Mini Review: History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera
My Rating : 4. 5 / 5 stars
Genre : YA
Page Count : 320 pages
Themes : LGBT+ , shared grief, depression, healing, coming of age
I’m not going to lie. This is a book that got me musing on all sorts of things and feeling all the feels…
THOUGHTS:
When people we love die suddenly, we tend to glorify them and turn their memory into something almost saintly. We compartmentalize the pain, focus on tiny details, guilt trip our own heart and actions into “if only” situations, where in an alternate reality things could have been different. Grief is messy, nonlinear, and although it doesn’t really ever go away, it does get better.
This is what I love so much about this book. Silvera focuses on Griffin and Jackson, two boys who are unexpectedly thrown into each others orbit after the death of their first love, Theo. Things get… messy (oh my god sooo messy!) but through their shared pain and emotions, they begin to remember that Theo was a person made out flesh and bone who made mistakes and was not by any means perfect. And no one really is. This is something Silvera makes sure to get across to the reader, his characters, (even the supporting ones!) are flawed and hold a primal, selfish, and altogether uniquely human quality. Their emotions don’t feel manufactured, they feel alive and I could feel them breathe and bend at every chapter. This book is so special and I could feel the bittersweet energy that fueled it against my fingertips every time I turned the page.
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