All the Bright Places in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 31, 2019 Brenda rated it it was amazing

Bittersweet, heart wrenching. Really brings awareness to mental illness.

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Feb 19, 2015 Tanya rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015, genre-young-adult, challenge-2015-popsugar, list-2016-reading-olympics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Partly because this is a difficult topic, the review is more difficult than others to write. I don't really have as much hope for Violet to carry on productively, but with Germ and the amount of contributors there, along with her expression to her parents of the changes that need to take place there, I can only barely buy into her survival, but in a changed mode. Probably not as a writer, but an editor only. And with a major need for counseling and quite possibly with her own emerging unusual me Partly because this is a difficult topic, the review is more difficult than others to write. I don't really have as much hope for Violet to carry on productively, but with Germ and the amount of contributors there, along with her expression to her parents of the changes that need to take place there, I can only barely buy into her survival, but in a changed mode. Probably not as a writer, but an editor only. And with a major need for counseling and quite possibly with her own emerging unusual method of coping, a darker one--it's just the path I see after all she has been through even with the elements of closure that occurred in the end of her journey. I don't have a lot of experience with survivors of suicide, but seeing the difficulty my friend's high school daughter is having, even without having lost her beloved sibling, well, it is just taking a lot of counseling and getting through self-destructive behaviors.

Theodore seemed like a brain injury survivor initially, though his mental illness is revealed later. The abuse by his father is part of why I had this belief initially, along with his just not being able to handle some days because of the noise and his headaches. His mental illness is revealed much later in the book, but the diagnosis still didn't fit as well with my experience of bipolar mania alternating with depression, but maybe that is because I only knew one doctor (and musician) who lived outside a mental institution. The rest were patients at a VA facility, so definitively a different population than a high school senior who was free to roam about. That his family just accepted his disappearances as normal was unacceptable to me, but this is the area where I have the least experience--families that have been victims of abuse. I really don't know the dynamics there from reading literature either. Yet, if he were not in high school, I would be more easily able to forgive them for not getting him help.

Other than the two main characters, the others were so peripheral to the story and so it falls a bit flat for me there too. The school counselor seems to have not done enough either to intervene, and sadly, that is our experience too within our district, so I can't say that surprises me. It angers me for a different reason than the family turning its head to not look for the reasons underlying Finch's behavior. It feels like a system error meant to protect the school and not the individual. And early on the counselor says what a huge mess he is going I have to deal with if Finch commits suicide, yet his response later doesn't seem on par with how he built it up initially. I would have expected more development here, as well as with each of his friends. It is part of what makes me reluctant to recommend this book to my friends, but if you enjoy the young adult genre, and books that will become movies, then read it. Otherwise, no reason to move this tio the top of your queue of books to read.

Favorite quotes:

P 126
"...Now all I see is someone who's too afraid to get back out there. Everyone around you is going to give you a gentle push now and then, but never hard enough because they don't want to upset Poor Violet. You need shoving, not pushing. You need to jump back on that camel/. Otherwise you're going to stay up on the ledge you've made for yourself."

P 349
"Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow." ...more

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