the things i've done : books

Saturday, 24 October 2015

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven // Book Review

all the bright places focuses on two characters; theodore finch and violet markey. finch is obsessed with death and is constantly thinking of ways to kill himself. whereas violet is counting down until graduation when she can escape indiana and the grief of her sister's death. they both meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school and from there their relationship blossoms.

this book was published this year and has become incredibly popular with glowing reviews (4.21/5 rating on goodreads) - however i didn't like this book quite that much. i read this book during the booktubeathon in august, and just reading my initial review of that book my opinions have changed a little. i gave it a 4/5 star rating although i think i'm going to change that to 3/5 and i stated my feeling towards the book were mixed. although i can firmly say that i didn't really like it.

however i would still give it a 3/5 because the book does have some redeeming qualities:

as you may have been able to tell by the synopsis above, this book is about mental health and suicide. not many young adult books focus on this, so i enjoyed that this opened the discussion. therefore i would also say that book comes with a trigger warning for suicide and mental health issues.
the book in general was very well written.
the ending of the book was rather emotional.

now for the things i didn't quite like about this book:

i did not like finch that much. i thought he was pretty pretentious and i unfortunately found him to be a little frustrating, although i did sympathise with him in some ways.
the fact that nobody actually helped finch frustrated me a lot. it is pretty damn obvious that his behaviour isn't normal and that he is suicidal, yet his friends and family do NOTHING to help. literal quotes from his family are "oh he's just like that" NO THAT ISN'T NORMAL.
to add to my last point, his counsellor could have done A LOT more as well.
the author kind of writes these characters as personified mental illnesses rather than actual people which isn't great.
the ending was predictable as fuck, sorry not sorry.
this complaint is pretty minor, but at the beginning of the book i felt like too many characters were introduced at once and some had pretty uncommon names which made it quite confusing in my opinion.

those are just my thoughts though! but i don't necessarily agree with the hype surrounding this book though. the book is also being described as a cross between the fault in our stars and eleanor and park, which i do kind of agree with so if you like those books you will probably enjoy this. if you have had a personal experience with suicide or mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder or depression in general, then this book will perhaps be rather triggering for you so i don't recommend that you read it.

i also noticed at the end of my goodreads review that i said that i weirdly wanted to see this book adapted into a movie. i do still stand by that - i feel that this would be quite interesting to see as a film.

if you have read this book, let me know what you thought in the comments below!

Monday, 6 January 2014

Christmas Book Haul

I'll be doing a video on this fairly soon, but here are the books I got at Christmas! The first three are books that I received and the last two are books that I bought with money that I received.

Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli

How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

Allegiant by Veronica Roth

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak

Everything is Connected by Keri Smith