And seeing it all through Samantha’s eyes brings it down to a believable level. It is a canny way of showing the potential effects (negative and otherwise) that career ambition can bring, to an individual, to a family, and to their friends. There is something instantly unlikable about Clay, but it is only as the story progresses that you truly learn the extent to which he is focused on Grace’s political campaign chances, above all else. In fact, I would argue the highs were so much more enjoyable because of the dark undercurrent of unease built up around Grace, her politician mum’s latest boyfriend/campaign manager, Clay Tucker.

In my experience, the use of the present tense can be gimmicky but, in this book’s case, it simply allows us to experience the summer along with Sam, along with its many highs, and its surprising and sudden lows. My Life Next Door somehow, expertly, manages to whisk a reader along on, yes, quite a nice mushy romantic read as we see the bubbling feelings grow between Samantha Reed and Jase Garrett… but that’s not all that we get.

It’s difficult to explain why I decided to give this young-adult contemporary such a high rating – which sounds slightly snobbier than intended but allow me to explain. As with all secrets, the truth will out eventually, and in a shocking series of events, the Garretts and the Reeds find themselves necessarily thrown together with Samantha finding her loyalties tested to the extreme. Welcomed into a family so freely, Samantha finds it a jarring change from her own household, with her mostly absent sister and perfectionist, politician mother, but keeps the Garretts her little secret. After years of being an outside observer, one summer Samantha finds herself easily slipping into life in the Garrett household when she begins to get closer to the boy-next-door Jase Garrett and the two fall in love. They are everything her own home and family life is not – chaotic but loving. Samantha Reed has spent her life gazing across at her neighbours, The Garretts, and their loud, rambunctious, sloppy lives. “The Garretts were forbidden from the start. Huntley Fitzpatrick’s My Life Next Door is a refreshing, funny, and summery read that takes a dramatic and sudden turn, a turn which made my heart ache in a way that few cutesy contemporary novels have managed whilst also unapologetically presenting a sickeningly sweet love story between a pair of teenagers.

The life next door