Book Review: Funny How Things Change by Melissa Wyatt

Book: Funny How Things Change
Author: Melissa Wyatt
Published: 2009
Source: Local Library

The summer after his high school graduation, Remy knows that big changes are coming. He’s just agreed to move away from Walker Mountain with his beloved girlfriend, Lisa, while she goes to college. He’ll be fine, he tells himself. He’ll get a job as a mechanic or something. What does it matter, as long as he’s with Lisa?

But as the reality of leaving the mountains and his roots looms closer, Remy starts to wonder if he loves Lisa . . . or he loves home more.

Remy is in the kind of situation that YA authors love to plant their protagonists in, and let them claw their way out. Living in a trailer in the Appalachians of West Virginia, with a single parent and very little money, no prospect of higher education and what many would consider a dead-end job, most kids in Remy’s life would climbing the walls to get out. Remy’s not.

But his beloved Lisa is. And while we can see from the first page that Remy has the mountains in his blood and could never be happy anywhere else but on his own land, it’s a realization he has to come to on his own. Realistic in its portrayal of modern-day Appalachia, a young man’s first love, and his first great adult choice, Funny How Things Change is a book that will resonate with kids at the same crossroads.