When I first found out about this book, I read it was The Fault...

When I first found out about this book, I read it was The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park and I borrowed it so fast I was a blur. 

After reading just the first character, I couldn’t hold with the comparison to The Fault in Our Stars. That book was about two young people who so desperately wanted to live and love and experience the rest of the world, yet were each suffering from cancer in their own ways. 

All the Bright Places introduces us to our main characters both standing on a ledge, and follows them through talking each other off the ledge and back towards living again.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand Finch’s desire to have a visible illness, something people could see and understand, and Violet’s grief over her dead sister. It’s not the depression that I’m commenting on, it’s the differences in mindsets between the two pairs of characters.

Eleanor and Park, however, is an exactly accurate comparison. Imagine the girl is popular instead of the boy, and it’s set in the present rather than the 1980s, but all the feels are the same. This isn’t a relationship that’s based on love, but on common interests and an empathy for each other’s situation. It’s two friends offering support to another person they previously thought they had nothing in common with, and learning otherwise. It’s… beautiful. 

I just started reading All the Bright Places yesterday, and this is my head canon for the main characters:

(pictured, Sam Claflin as Finnick Odair from The Hunger Games, and Jessica Sula as Grace Blood from Skins)