Hello, everyone! Happy Friday! Are you looking forward to the weekend? What are your plans?
I’m back with another On the Bookshelf post! These are quickly becoming some of my favorites… you all know how I love to talk about books!
All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
This novel is about Violet and Finch, who meet on the bell tower of their school one day when they both contemplate jumping off. Finch convinces Violet not to and this starts an intense relationship between the two teens.
I don’t know where to start with this book. I listened to the audiobook and I knew it wasn’t going to be the easiest “read”… this topic is always hard to read about. At the beginning of the story I was drawn into the characters and the storyline and I appreciated it. However, as the novel went on I really started to distance myself from it. There were things that I had problems with. Even though the story is told from a dual point-of-view it felt like Violet was the main character of the story and Finch was there to move the story along for her. I thought that Finch was a really compelling character, so that just made me sad. I also didn’t understand how their depression was handled by the adults in their lives; I didn’t think that some of the adults were helping them as much as they could have. It could be that they really couldn’t do more, but it seemed odd to me. Because of some of the issues that I had, I distanced myself from the book so much that the end of the story didn’t tug at me emotionally, even though I teared up during the author’s note once the story was done.
There are two reviews that I read that sum up my thoughts about this book better than I could. (Please note, there will be spoilers in the following links.) I was nodding my head along with every point that Layla from The Midnight Garden made and she linked to this article from Disability in Kidlit that was also a fantastic review.
I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend this book, but if you’d like to read it or were thinking about reading it, you should! Most people rave about it and you might not have some of the issues that I had with it. However, I wondered if this book could be triggering, and some reviews that I read (including one of the two linked above) have said that it is, so if this book could be a trigger for you, I’d stay away from it.
PS – Check out my review of Ink and Bone and my most recent On My Bookshelf post!
>> Follow me on: Bloglovin’ // Instagram // Twitter // Pinterest // Facebook
