Eliza's Reviews > Trailer Park Heart

★3.5 STARS★

Ruby Dawson has worked hard to ensure her future would be different than the one that everyone in town had predicted for her. Raised in a trailer park by her ex-stripper mother, the odds that she would make a success of herself were well and truly stacked against her. On the cusp of proving them all wrong and going off to college, Ruby allows herself one night to let her hair down alongside the peers that spurned her throughout high school. Armed with her checklist of “firsts” Ruby crashes the party of arch nemesis Levi Cole.

Arch nemesis may be a slight exaggeration but Ruby and Levi have a rivalry that extends as far back as she remembers. They are night and day in many ways but they are similar in that they are both driven by their desire to leave town. Levi is the last person Ruby would like to bump into but in doing so it gives them the opportunity to talk and bring an end to their feud.

Seven years later, working in a diner and living in her mother’s trailer, is not the future Ruby would have ever envisaged for herself. She hates that she has proven the naysayers right but she isn’t forced to look at what she missed out on until a family situation has brings Levi back to town. She’d accepted the life she had but Levi’s return bring fresh perspective and forces her to confront truths she had long left buried.

I revelled in the underlying tension and chemistry in their relationship, and although I understood her reasoning for not wanting to give in, there were times when I found Ruby to be unnecessarily combative. I always enjoy rooting for the disadvantaged and Ruby certainly possessed some of a true underdog. It would have been incredibly tempting for her to fall into the damsel in distress category, but even with the sweet hero-like demeanour Levi’s had, she keep her feet firmly on the ground. Trailer Park Heart is a story that touches on loss, and hope but that dares to bloom in the most damaged of hearts.