Review: All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Published January 6th 2015

I’d seen so many great reviews on All the Bright Places and so many people told me it was their new favorite book of all time. I was very hesitant to read this book because of the hype. I  didn’t want to get my hopes up really high so I started All the Bright Places with an extremely open mind. And I was very surprised by this book in several different ways.

All the Bright Places is about a boy named Finch who is almost always thinking about death and dying. It’s also about a girl named Violet who is grieving over her sister’s recent death. These two kids meet in an unexpected way and the book follows them as their friendship progresses.

I finished this book four days ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it. That’s very rare for me because I normally finished a book and then move on to the next. Very few books will stop me in my tracks. But All the Bright Places did.

The first 176 pages of this book were… weird for me. I don’t know what it was but I just couldn’t get fully into the book. I liked it a lot and I knew it was an amazing book but I just couldn’t feel it as much as I knew I should. I think it’s because I’ve been reading a crap ton of contemporary lately and deep down I really wanted to be reading fantasy. But while the thought of putting this book on hold crossed my mind a of couple times in the first 176 pages, I also was outraged at myself for wanting to stop reading. So I keep reading. When I hit page 178, something clicked in my brain and I finally felt this book. I suddenly felt everything that I should have been feeling since page one and I all but rushed though the rest of the book because I was amazed by how beautiful this book is and how amazing Jennifer Niven is for writing such a master piece.

People have been comparing this book to John Green’s books and Rainbow Rowell’s which at first upset me a little bit because those two are insane writers. I love their books and no one could ever be compared to them. But Jennifer Niven can. She’s amazing. The way she pieces words together, it’s almost poetic. Everything she writes just seems perfect and understandable in a way words can’t describe.

Finch and Violet somehow seem less than fictitious. They both seemed so real and tangible. And the more I read their story the more I wanted to know them. I wanted to be able to talk to them and tell them it’s gonna be okay. Somehow Jennifer Niven wrote two amazingly complex and beautiful characters that can become much more than fictional characters.

Overall, this book is beautiful and heartfelt in a way that’s not common in literature. I still feel stunned by All the Bright Places even though I finished it days ago. This book has really stood out for me in a way that I won’t soon forget. This book swept me up in its whirlwind of magnificent storytelling and hasn’t let me go. I’ll be rereading this book in the near future and I highly recommend picking up this book sometime soon.