All the Bright Places Review

Title: All the Bright Places
Author: Jennifer Niven
 Publisher: Knopf
Genre: Romance, Contemporary

Spoilers are in white. Highlight to read. 

Blurb:(from goodreads) Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him.
 
Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.
 
When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders” of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself—a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink.
 
This is an intense, gripping novel perfect for fans of Jay Asher, Rainbow Rowell, John Green, Gayle Forman, and Jenny Downham from a talented new voice in YA, Jennifer Niven.

Me: I am speechless, I am wonderstruck. I am mindblown and torn apart and crying and amazed. 

The Ups: The fact that I am even trying to review this book and trying to analyze it is so crazy, because I am at a loss for words. I went into this novel not too pumped because I thought that it could never top Eleanor and Park or The Fault In Our Stars and would just be a weird knock-off, but I was so wrong.

I have never met a character like Theodore Finch. I have never seen such a character who loved so strongly and so passionately and was so incredibly smart and talented but broken at the same time. His love, his passion, his beauty really came to me like no other. He was horrific but beautiful, shattered but lovely. The fact that he was bipolar scared me so much, but I think that the way it was written and the way I could feel it slowly getting to him made it even better. 

Violet Markey, I loved, because she was nothing special. She had had such horrible things happen to her, but she really gained strength as the book went on. She was incredibly afraid, but wouldn't admit it. And the thing that I also really liked was that I could see her moving on. I could see her always remembering Finch, but becoming a really amazing person. That gave me a lot of hope at the end.

The two of them together were beautiful. They were the Jovian-Plutonian gravitational chamber. (Read the book you'll get it.) They were, I think, a match that would have been incredibly unlikely but they connected because of what they had experienced, what they had gone through.  There was just so much beauty in this book. It was one of those stories that really makes you think and try to understand the book and just life in general after you read it, and I shed quite a lot of tears in the book, not because it was overly depressing, but because I realized that this was something real people had to deal with, and that broke my heart. 
It makes us question:
"Can we just ever cut out all the bad words from our lives?"

The Downs: I started writing this review about 30 minutes after I read the book, after I relaxed a bit and stopped crying. Right then and there, the book was flawless. It had completely blown me away. Now, looking back on the book, I realize that there were some technical things that I hadn't noticed while reading it, but it doesn't matter, really, because what I took from the book was the intense emotion I had felt right after reading it. 

Overall: It's been a very long time since I've read any book that moved me this much, especially a romance.

Rating: Beat. My. Scale.