All the Bright Places - Jennifer Niven

“I remember running down a road on my way to a nursery of flowers. I remember her smile and her laugh when I was my best self and she looked at me like I could do no wrong and was whole. I remember how she looked at me the same way even when I wasn’t. I remember her hand in mine and how that felt, as if something and someone belonged to me.”

I don’t know what I expected from All The Bright Places anymore. I mean, the synopsis begins with the line ‘When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom,’ and it sounds great. (Bell tower at a school though? I just rolled with it) I don’t know what and why but either way, it sounded nice. It sounded interesting, it sounded special. In the author’s note, Jennifer Niven mentions that she wanted to write an ‘edgy’ novel, a YA novel, a novel about personal pain (I wouldn’t have known this just reading the book, sadly). Was it all those things? I suppose you know where I’m getting at.

Meet Ultraviolet Remarkey-able – and I wish so bad I was kidding about that name but sadly I’m not. I mean, I kind of found the nickname cute in that terrible, dorky way that makes you want to cringe, at first anyway. But I lost count how many times the Hot Reckless Boy^TM of the book repeats it. And I mean, it honestly made me cringe every single time so I hope you feel my pain here. Violet recently lost her sister, Violet is depressed, unfairly pretty, a cheerleader, a writer, quirky and popular. I kind of liked Violet. I had nothing against her depressed quirkiness. I think. Oh, also, Violet makes a webzine designed to help teenagers with all their problems, because she’s kind of saintly like that. It’s mostly irrelevant to the plot but relevant to my annoyance so there you go.

Theodore Finch is the mandatory hot reckless guy. He’s bipolar, suicidal, unreliable and hot, basically everything you could expect from a discount hot guy. Want to know the worst part of his character, though? He does not sound like a 18-year old. I mean, he quotes Virginia Woolf (some of it with the help of Google, which did make me chuckle) and writes Violet poetry on email. He writes songs and to top it off, he also talks like someone from the 19^th century. I’ll get back to his ultimately annoying poetry when I’m ready to spoil the ending for you.

The book claims to be the story of both of these characters, but I believe it was the story of Violet more than anything. She was characterised more strongly, and she got the focus most of the way. I don’t mind – she was more likeable than pretentious Finch whom the end made me hate more than anything. I'm not going to go into detail about the plot - they're forced to be friends and fall in love, naturally. The plot lacks actual conflict, and I was just constantly waiting, waiting and waiting.

I’ve seen people compare this book to The Fault in Our Stars, and I’m fairly sure the synopsis brought this up as well. It's not out of nowhere, either - we have the atmosphere of death, the girl whose name is a colour, the guy whose name is right-up ridiculous and to top it off, they do not sound like teenagers in the slightest with their metaphors and carefully constructed sentences. Of course, All the Bright Places loses in this comparison by miles – the plot was dull and lacked the tension of TFIOS most of the way through, the characters didn’t sound beautifully poetic but annoyingly so, and most importantly, TFIOS did it first. All the Bright Places is in this sense a Monday copy, a lookalike mimicking the success of a wildly better book – and I’m not even a TFIOS fangirl, believe it or not.

The weird thing is that I enjoyed the book, mostly. It was around the time Finch runs six miles frantically to get Violet flowers (violets, naturally) and where I took the quote at the top of the page from that I started to think, ‘Wait a minute. Do I actually enjoy these characters, because they’re kind of starting to piss me off right now?’ From there it was all downhill and the last tenth of the book (audiobooks make me measure weirdly, I know), I just forced myself to chug it down so that I could write a review about it and finally, thankfully read something else. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m getting over my YA phase because there are at least 50 more YA novels I’d like to read and enjoy.

…So anyway, the ending. The ending. Finch dies – it’s not surprising per se, but it was badly built and the tempo of the book didn’t give it the importance it could have had. I wish to draw another parallel to TFIOS here – it’s the same ‘this even is so important I’ll just say it’ kind of plot development. Finch actually commits suicide by drowning, and before he does, he leaves Violet fucking cryptic Facebook messages filled with poems to talk about the places he visited before fucking killing himself. I am so annoyed by the premise of this that the wannabe cuteness of Violet visiting all these places and seeing the signs he left behind didn’t make me awww or feel bittersweet or anything. I was just so done.

Violet also writes pretty little poetry for Finch after he’s dead and I continue to be so done. We pretend to see Violet pick up the pieces of her broken life but I think Niven was too afraid to actually give us an actual look at her future, so we get half-assed little glimpses instead. I don’t think this was the right time to ~leave it up to the reader~, honestly.

I think this is where the book goes wrong for me. I mean, the author wants to get across the message that suicide is serious, that I should feel sorry for Finch, who felt like he had no other option. But honestly? His life didn’t seem that bad to me and half the book was from his POV so I should know. He seemed to be kind of getting it together and then he spends a week or so visiting all the cool sights of Indiana (this makes sense in the context, sort of) and writing poetry. Then he kills himself, and I don’t feel sorry for him, and I think he had a choice, and I think he was an annoying asshole. I’m just so upset by this, ugh. Like Everything, Everything, this is another audio book I’ll be returning to Audible, because I honestly did not like it.

Also! There’s going to be a movie based on this book, apparently! I can't express how much complaining I'll be doing when it actually comes out. *sigh*

On other news, I picked up Never Always Sometimes as my next project, and so far it seems like a fairly typical high school novel with unquirky, actually teenager-like main characters. I’m content with my life choices right now, but I still can’t recommend All the Bright Places to you.