The writing is fluid and though the story slows and then speeds up, it never quite gets to the point of stopping and then restarting. It’s quite upbeat (bordering on too much so, but not quite crossing that line) and there are some lovely touches like all the Virginia Woolf quotes. I think Finch and Violet would approve.ĭespite the subject matter, this is a lovely book to read. This book could end only one of two ways, and indeed it did. The pain was raw but it was the description of Finch’s symptoms that I thought really shone through, and the idea of him being awake but sleepwalking through life, alive but not really living did work. I thought this book portrayed depression well. Their friendship is a bit forced initially – a school project ties them together beyond their first, explosive encounter – but we needed something to keep them bound to each other for the story, and this does work to explain how two completely different people end up part of each other’s lives. Things are fine one minute and changed completely the next. She didn’t see it coming, and she didn’t see the aftermath, either, as it crept up.
It would be easy to say this fits in with mental health stereotypes, but the thing with Violet is she wasn’t always this way. It’s a subtle difference, and it comes through in this book.įinch and Violet are both character characters by which I mean they are written to be different, quirky, broken, whatever. This may seem flippant but I thought it was quite an important point to make as it resonates with so many stories of suicidal intention where someone doesn’t necessarily want to die, but they just don’t want to live. In this book Finch sort of wants to die, but seems to be finding almost insignificant reasons not to go through with it – it would be a horrible mess for someone to clear up, and so on. We had lots of divorce and occasionally people died, but the frank approach to teens wanting to take their own lives just wasn’t talked (or written) about in the way it is now, in books such as this and Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher and My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga and so on. I’m oddly intrigued by suicide books, partly because I do a lot of work on suicide and child and adolescent mental health as part of my day job, and partly because I don’t remember quite so many books being quite so daring in this regard when I was an official young adult. At least one of them has a plan to make the pain stop in the most final way possible. And he doesn’t mean that in terms of physically awake, but more so in terms of his emotions.
Finch, meanwhile has started from zero and is logging the number of days in a row he is awake. Violet is on countdown to graduation, to getting away from the school and town that hold so many torturous memories. Finch and Violet are both counting the days.
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