I will tell you straight off that Fading is about a young woman dealing with the horror of being raped and struggling to find her life again. It’s also an excellent New Adult title that goes a long way in reassuring me that the genre has a lot to offer besides love triangles and underage drinking.

Candace Parker’s life isn’t perfect. Her uptight, shallow mother disapproves of Candace’s determination to become a professional ballet dancer, caring only about her daughter’s lack of an acceptable society boyfriend. Candace admits that she’s a bit of control freak who doesn’t really like to take risks in her life. But she’s built herself a loving surrogate family with her roommate Kimber and best friend Jase, a gay man who has family issues of his own. She’s excited to begin her final year at the University of Washington and to finally realize her dream of dancing in New York City.

Everything changes the night that Candace is brutally raped and beaten by Jack, a guy she’s dated a couple of times. Unable to process that such a horrible thing has happened to her, Candace calls Jase, who comes to the hospital and then takes her back to his apartment. She spends the next week recovering from her wounds and trying to hold herself together. She adamantly refuses to press charges against Jack, wanting only to forget everything about that awful night.

Over the next few months, Candace forces herself to go through the motions of living. Her nights are plagued with nightmares, her days a constant fight against the panic attacks that threaten whenever she’s in a crowd. Because she can’t speak of her rape to anyone other than Jase and his boyfriend, Mark, Candace alienates Kimber, who doesn’t understand why Candace has shut her out and seems to be lying to her. Working at her job at the local coffee shop proves traumatic as Candace lives in fear that Jack could walk through the door at any minute. Even dancing, her only form of escape, is affected because she’s so afraid to feel any emotion at all, even as a form of artistic expression.

It isn’t until Candace meets Ryan Campbell, the owner of a local bar and a friend of Jase and Mark’s, that things begin to change. Slowly, Candace and Ryan become friends, and she finds that she can relax around Ryan, that he makes her feel safe. When Candace and her parents have a falling out on Christmas Eve, she spends Christmas with Ryan’s large, boisterous family and finally experiences what it’s like to have unconditional acceptance. But as their feeling for each other grow into love, Candace fears that if Ryan ever finds out what happened to her, he will reject her. In addition, she doesn’t know how much longer she can avoid becoming intimate with Ryan without revealing her secret. What Candace doesn’t know is that Ryan has a secret of his own.

I hesitate to describe a book that depicts rape and its after-affects as refreshing, but I was so pleased to finally read an NA book depicting relatable characters and a love story that unfolded slowly and realistically. Candace’s rape is treated with the seriousness and respect such a topic deserves. Unlike in so many other NA books, her assault isn’t a throw-away event so that she can be rescued by a protective hero, or used to try to convince readers that she’s so desirable that men are simply unable to control themselves in her presence. Candace’s life is utterly destroyed by what happened to her, and her long, slow crawl back to a positive place is painful and realistic.

As a character and a survivor, Candace often proved frustrating, refusing to speak of what had happened to her to anyone other than Jase. Add in the fact that she is violently unwilling to press charges against Jack and there were times when I wanted to shake her. But I understood why she felt the way that she did, her embarrassment and humiliation and, over it all, her deep sense of guilt that she had brought the attack on herself. Add in her family history and pathological need to avoid dealing with her feelings or facing her problems, my heart broke for her on several occasions.

Ryan is a protective hero, but his need to take care of Candace and his desire to shield her from any pain comes about naturally, after the two have gotten to know each other and his feelings for her have deepened. Granted, Ryan is twenty-eight and therefore presumably more mature than the college-aged heroes in other NA titles, but he doesn’t completely lose his mind dealing with the fact that his girlfriend was assaulted and her attacker is still at large. His sensitivity to her fears about becoming intimate and his willingness to take things slowly and on her terms helped Candace to heal far better than any mindless quest for vengeance.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between Candace and Jase. The scene when Jase arrives at the hospital and sees a battered, destroyed Candace sent tears to my eyes. Her need to lean on him entirely as the only person in the world who made her feel completely safe rang absolutely true, as did Ryan’s eventual need for Candace to shift away from Jase and toward him as her source of comfort.

Fading isn’t perfect. The writing is often clunky and awkward in parts, and it could have used a second pass through editing to catch some confusing inconsistencies. The middle drags on a bit too long, and I found the ending a bit too Hollywood simplistic. And while I can only imagine the real life anguish that is surviving a sexual assault, there are barely any scenes in the book in which Candace does not break out in tears. It may be a realistic reaction, but it did get a bit tedious to read about.

That said, I was thrilled to finally find a New Adult story that didn’t involve love triangles, bad-boy heroes, or instantaneous, obsessive love for an undeserving heroine. I can easily recommend Fading for those who can handle the sensitive subject matter.