I have no idea who or what service recommended to me Abby Fabiaschi’s I Liked My Life and Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places. I had them both on hold at the library and both became available at the same time. Both books are also about suicide, so I have been spending a lot of time with the subject over the last 10 days. As someone who lost his father to suicide, I went through the same set of emotions that the principal characters in […]
Do You Think There’s Such a Thing as a Perfect Day?
So, here I am, more than a month after finishing this novel, trying to write a review. Sigh. First of all, I enjoyed reading this YA outing, as much as you can enjoy a novel where one of the main characters is bipolar but doesn’t seem to fully understand what that means. It’s the story of two very different teenagers, trying to survive high school but for very different reasons. Finch is the classic loner, obsessed with death, smart but unable to fully follow the […]
A Wanna-Be Novel that Comes Close
Welcome to the backlog of reviews I’m going to try to start churning out now that I’m back from vacation! Hopefully at least one a day until I’m caught up (and, by then, I’ll have more since I doubt I’ll stop reading any time soon…) First up is All the Bright Places, a YA book which, according to Google, is “The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park.” I’m going to disagree on that. I think it wants to be, it tries to be, […]
Make sure you have a box of tissues ready when you read this one. Because crying.
All the Bright Places has been showing up in a lot of places lately. I saw it at the library. I noticed reviews of it online from people I trust. I saw comparisons of it to other books I really liked — I’ll Give You the Sun and Eleanor & Park, to name a few. So I knew I had to add it to the list. And I’m glad I did. It really was lovely. And sad. Did I mention it was sad? Because it was really, really sad. Violet […]