All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Jennifer Niven has spent most of her literary life writing adult fiction, but after stepping out of her comfort zone, she has produced what is easily one of the best teen fiction novels to grace the shelves of bookstores. Wrought with perfect descriptions of what depression actually feels like, All the Bright Places is quite a tearful read, but it is definitely worth fighting through to the end which, incidentally, is a major theme of the book.

Written in alternating points of view, the book is focused on two teenagers in their last year of high school, Violet Markey and Theodore Finch, Jr., both of whom have experienced tragedy. Immediately, it is revealed that Violet’s older sister, Eleanor, recently died in a car crash, and though some time has passed, Violet and the rest of her family are still trying to piece their lives back together. Despite the fact that the loss of her sister affected her once cheery personality as well as her social life, the seventeen-year-old still fits into the “popular” crowd at school, but that status is threatened when Violet runs into Finch (commonly referred to as Theodore Freak by most of the student body) at the top of the High School’s bell tower, both of them with rather ill-intentions. The two form a strange sort of friendship and end up paired up on a Geography project that requires traveling their home state of Indiana.

Though Violet’s issues are made obvious from the start, Finch’s story is played out much slower, and with each chapter, both Violet and the reader find out just a little bit more about him. As he narrates his experiences, Finch often talks about being “asleep” and his chapters are numbered by how many days he has been “awake”. “This happens every time,” he says. “—the blanking out, the waking up. I’m like that old man with the beard, Rip Van Winkle. Now you see me, now you don’t.” This is the first clue that Theodore Finch is not a perfect, happy boy.

Brash and a little odd, Finch is living just for the moment and though Violet isn’t overly fond of him at the beginning of their journey, he ends up being just the thing she needs to pull her out of the darkness that consumed her and remind her how to live again.

During their wanderings, Violet and Finch become one another’s life vests, keeping them afloat in the whirlpool that they are both trying desperately to get out of and while visiting all of the strange sights and landmarks circled on their map, their only stipulation is that they leave something behind at each of them, a small token to prove that they were in fact there.

All the Bright Places is written fantastically. Sprinkled with both humor and heartbreak, Jennifer Niven has a voice that can leave readers laughing one second and crying the next. The novel is unbelievably relatable for anyone who has battled with depression or any other mental illness and explains what it feels like to anyone who hasn’t with such accuracy that readers won’t be able to help feeling the same love and pain that Violet and Finch do. Though the story is heavy and may require breaks for some who are more sensitive to the subject matter, the reader will close the book with a newfound inspiration and motivation to keep on fighting when life gets tough.

A movie adaptation of All the Bright Places is in the works, but the release date is still unknown.

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