Thoughts on "All the Bright Places"

Three weekends ago, I spent 2.5 days reading All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven. That half day was a Monday morning when I took vacation from work, got my kid ready for school, and sent my husband off with my son so I could crawl back into bed and finish the book.

I had to. I HAD TO.

But  you should know this isn’t a book review.

A quick recap of the book, with no spoilers: Violet Markey is a teenager, mourning her recently deceased sister, and struggling with mental health issues that lead to her to the top of a clock tower on her high school campus. Theodore Finch is a classmate, unsettled, unhappy, beautifully-eloquent boy who is also at the top of the tower, toying with the option of jumping.

For a brief moment – the briefest - they save each other.

This could be another YA book (or Netflix movie, as it is), but … its not. Violet and Theo have stayed with me a long time, longer than a lot of characters stay with me after I race through their pages, appreciate their voices, they’re author’s lyrical words. Finch, and especially Violet, became real to me in a way that I dream of my characters becoming real in my readers heads. And here’s why:

They ARE real.

As I’ve been out, living my life the last few weeks, I see teenage girls walking down the street near my house, grasping hands over black ice on sidewalks, huddled in Sherpa jackets. Long shiny hair waving along spines, short tight curls sticking up to the clouds, muffled only by beanies. Teenagers in Starbucks, midrifs bare even though its February and South Dakota. Glasses slipping down noses as they drink iced coffee – I wonder what their drink of choice is. Talking with friends, fingertips to throats in laughs, chins pointed to the ceiling as they giggle. I picture the girls in their classrooms, eating dinner with their families, aimlessly texting their dumb, dumb don’t-they-know-how-lucky-they-are boyfriends/best friends/siblings/co-workers.

What are the girls thinking? How do they know how to look so effortlessly cool? Someone’s listening to her, right? When she opens her mouth to share the real problems in her head – that dumb, dumb boyfriend, the lost sister, the clueless Mom, the bad grade, the guy who catcalled her on the street where I saw her – somebody’s listening, right?
Please, god, someone be listening.

Violet has the picture-perfect life on paper. Perfect, cool parents. Friends who will do in the meantime, as she waits for college. A successful website she runs with her sister. And it crashes down in the most tragic way possible. And there at the edge of the world, at the edge of everything, there’s Finch.
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 “The thing I realize is, that it’s not what you take, it’s what you leave.”

Violet thinks these words near the end of All the Bright Places. With Finch, Violet visits places all over Indiana for a school project, and part of the challenge is to leave parts of themselves, trinkets, representing head space, memories, jokes. The concept of leaving something behind obviously takes on larger meaning, as it should, and that’s the one large part of this book I can talk about that doesn’t spoil anything. For as much as these girls, these-almost adults need someone to be listening – please, god, someone be listening – these girls also need to leave parts of themselves buried in their friend’s heart, under their mom’s skin, chap stick smeared on a Starbucks straw, cells from their fingertips on shoelaces and on doorknobs as they storm from the room.

Violet, I’d say, finds a way to leave pieces of herself behind, mostly in a lot of ways she wouldn’t want to have to do. I have no amount of real understanding of Violet’s struggles throughout this book – she suffers far more than she should have to – but her heart. It’s so encompassing. We obviously don’t see her beyond the last page, but I hope that she doesn’t let anything, or anyone, narrow the path in.