Long Live the Queen by Ellen Emerson White

I thought this aspect was realistic and left me understanding where Meg was coming from. The story is more 'adult' than some YA, which perhaps shouldn't be unsurprising, given Meg's traumatic past and that she's a college student. It's a moving and believable portrayal of family.

But love is complicated further by trauma and politics. I really liked Meg's close friends - including a couple of her new friends - and her family The Powers' family relationships are deeply complex resolving familial conflict is a slow, complicated process, and yet, underneath everything, there is so much love. Meg is struggling so many things: trying to be a normal college student when she is the last thing from normal, her difficulties recovering physically and emotionally, strained relationships, her unhappy shattered family, making new friends and dealing with the press, and the way her public and private lives have intersected. I think these are the things I loved about Meg - that despite being a traumatised emotionally and physically, she's smart, cynical and funny and still a believable teenager. Although this means it's not remarkably poetical or original prose, the novel's tone is Meg's - intelligent, acerbic, 18 years old and slightly humorous. (I like details.) It's third person but we're very much inside Meg's head. It's a tome of a book - one which could have been edited drastically, but I'm glad it wasn't. I was looking for books about university students, and I expected it to be an average YA, neither as long nor as dark as it is. The back-story unfolds slowly but everything important is explained (and I kept reading also because I wanted to know what had happened to Meg beforehand ). Long May She Reign is actually the fourth (and so far, final) about Meg and I have to say, it stands very well on its own. But college is not easy when everyone knows your story, you are accompanied everywhere by body-guards, reporters camp outside your door, your political science class is full of people who take cheap shots at the current administration, and you are in constant terrible pain, struggle to walk and wake everyone up at night with your screaming nightmares. Meg decides that - ready or not - she needs to get her life together. Instead of going away for her first year of college and doing the sports she loves, she's stuck in the White House, her days filled with physical therapy, struggling with classes she dislikes at a local university, and awkward family mealtimes. Now she has a seriously injured knee and a smashed hand, emotionally traumatised and suffers from horrific nightmares.

If that weren't enough to prevent one from having a normal life, 6 months ago Meg was kidnapped by terrorists - brutalised, starved and left for dead. Meg Power's mother is the President of the United States.

Long Live the Queen by Ellen Emerson White