Review: All the Bright Places

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All the Bright Places is a painful book, in a good way. It starts off cliche and then quickly snowballs into a complicated messy story about hurt, love, and death. It is unexpected in interesting ways and it will emotionally empty you by the end. It is a painful book, and it is manic and draining and powerful.

What Jennifer Niven does well is pull together something with a kind of raw energy. It is unapologetically giddy, it races up to the highs and then rushes down to the lows, over and over. The voices of the characters, while a bit same-y across the two main narrators, is unreliable in the sense that knowing their innermost thoughts does not translate into knowing how they are perceived or what actions they end up taking in the heat of the moment or outside the frame of our reference. This keeps the characters intimate yet known. The plot races towards tragedy, and it hurts when it hits because it's impossible to not hope for the people you are reading about.

On the other hand, this is not a perfect book. The cliche's are a bit on the nose at times, Violet and Finch sometimes come off as stereotypes of YA characters rather than actual characters. Their personalities outside of the plot itself are vague and remain unexplored. The plot itself, while strong, is missing some complexity. The central relationship is interesting, but no other ones are properly explored. These are complicated themes and ideas, and I feel like the book doesn't quite do them justice in the space it has taken.

I do want to note, however, that these critiques are mostly post-hoc. While at points I was taken out by a paragraph here, or a creative choice there, overall the book kept me engaged. For all my complaints, I needed to take a long walk to clear my head after I finished because of how painful a book it turned out to be. That's worth something.

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