Reviews tagging 'Suicide attempt'

I fell in love with hope by Lancali

64 reviews

marieanne21's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

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hexatrance's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Wow this is a hard hitting book. The writing has some really really beautiful lines that I've highted to write down. It became a little 'manic pixie dream girl' towards the middle (Im not too sure that speech would've got them free tattoos but hey) and it took me a while to warm to Hikari because of that, but the second half is really tormentingly mesmerising. I couldn't tear my eyes away even when I knew what was coming. These characters had been built up so much that just a single word chapter title like 'wings' or 'music' told you exactly what was going to happen to who next. Neo has my heart and I love the concept of Sam, I would have even liked that to have been played into more. I like that she kept the illness vague like she said she would in the foreword, because that stopped the reading experience being about trying to diagnose the characters with irl diseases, and made it about them as personalities. The after word is heartbreaking. Major TW warnings so check the foreward.
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s_emira's review

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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jac3rd's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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gigi770080's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This book made me cry more than any book before. Every word was so beautifully tragic and perfect, I knew it was going to be a five star read by only the first line. The parallels in this book are stunning and so sad at the same time. Read this. Read this now.
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iris14's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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harmonique's review against another edition

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emotional sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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agiali's review against another edition

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5.0

☼ 197/ 108

I fell in love with each and every person in this beautifully broken found family.

I bought this book to conquer my own fears regarding my illness and also to see how many tears I could shed within these 400 pages. It's safe to say this book broke me in ways more than one. With Lancali's beautiful prose, I had to stop and stare at what seemed like poetry on the tear-stained pages. I expected to fall in love with the cast, but I didn't expect to fall in love with hope as well.

With a book as beautiful as this one, I don't even know where to begin. We follow Sam, a character who follows death and runs away from love. After Sam witnesses their lover's suicide, they're an empty figure. Sam only opens his heart again for the group of bandits they call friends: Couer, Neo, and Sony. This chaotic group creates a Hit List, a list created to prove they're still full of life, to kill death, disease, and time all at once. As they steal more things, a broken artist named Hikari enters, a perfect resemblance to Sam's lost lover.

This book made me unwell. Not only did the book completely crush my heart for our hospital family, but it also hurt me for the relationships outside of the hospital; The relationships not confined to white walls and broken clocks. With a book as beautiful and heartbreaking as this, I genuinely do not know how I'll go on. I've been on the hunt for another sob-filled read since November 2021, and I definitely just found it.

I found myself on these pages. It hurt to see others go through what I had. It hurt to know that Lancali's heart and soul were poured and ripped out into this novel. This is a story about what most people shy away from. I fell in love with hope is one of my favorite reads of 2022 so far, one of my new favorite books of all time, and one that I will never shut up about.
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glutenfreebread's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I Fell in Love with Hope is a story like no other, a telling of pain and joy, with poetry in every line, and emotion living in the pages. This book tore my heart into pieces, but put it back together again with Sony's dirty white shoes, Neo's sea of ink, Coeur's tangled earbuds, the sun in Hikari's eyes, and Sam's love for them all. I have never cried so much over a book, over people I now wish I could have known myself, over a beautiful story, I feel, everyone needs to read. I know I have taken a piece of each of them after finishing this story, and if you are on the fence about reading it yourself, consider this your sign, because this book is the most devastatingly beautiful thing I have read all year, and everyone should find a piece of themselves in it. 

For a while, the start of the book felt slow, but the more I read the more I understood why it was this way. It is the perfect amount of time to fall in love with these people before they died. Coeur's death hurt the most, as I knew the gentle giant would no longer be able to smile with his other half. He would not finish telling his story with his composer, and as a writer myself, it struck me deeply. Sony and Neo were both equally as devastating to let go of. Sony for her relentless positive bubbly attitude that I grew to love, and Neo's snarky remarks that were full of love, but knowing them and having their memories is something I'll cherish forever. Sometimes the flow of the writing would get lost on me, and descriptions became overbearing at points, but it never ruined the feel of the story for me. This is definitely one of my all-time favourites, and will stay that way for a long time
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lolajh's review

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

No amount of knowledge of how sad this book is could have ever prepared me for the just utter hurt I am feeling over this book (which means it is just so very good). Going into it I knew it was about sick kids and love and death but i can’t even explain the tears that I shed so continuously throughout reading this.
Feeling love and loss myself just reading this, getting attached to these beautiful characters and then greiving them? Fuck me.
 

One of the letdowns of this book was unfortunately Sam, the main character. As a narrator, they were impeccable; their words and observations and thoughts about the world were so beautiful, if a little dramatic at times, but as a character, i was just so unable to connect with them. They are rather emotionless and one-dimensional,
and yes, of course this is due to them not being human, but that aspect I would have so much rathered not be in the book. Plus making them non-human and genderless/nonbinary ticks me off a bit. I hate that their whole character only ended up being this non-human soul of a creature. The plot line was so predictable, because they so frequently act alien-like in the book, so it was hard not to think they weren’t human, which made the reveal underwhelming, and I overall just really disliked this element of the book. And their whole character arc I felt was just them and Hikari’s romance, and so much of Sam’s story just seemed to be revolves around other people, like their ex-lover, then Hikari, and then their friends. I still don’t really know them as a character independent from other people, which is something that definitely impacts my enjoyment of this book.
and compared to the absolute angel cast of side characters that are so fully fleshed-out with beautiful stories, having Sam as the main character makes the story fall quite flat, whereas if the book was just about Hikari, Neo, Sony, and Coeur (the absolute best side characters that carried this book and are the reason I still rated the book high), it would have been a wonderful story of intricate characters that definitely didn’t need Sam to be among them.

Out of the group, Sony has to be my favourite. An absolute sunshine of a character who has my whole heart. Her range and shift of emotions throughout the book, her connections and relationships with different people, all had me absolutely yearning for her pov to be in the book instead of or in addition to Sam. She’s perfect and I love her. I loved seeing her happy and positive, not only because that made me happy, but also because of how it shows how you can be sick, chronically ill, and still happy, and have a fulfilling life. Her not allowing having only one fucking lung to stop her from wanting to do the things she wants was so beautiful. I will eternally love Sony, 10000/10 character.

And goddamn NEO. He means absolutely everything to me. His experience with his illnesses, particularly his anorexia, was heartbreaking, as all eating disorder rep ends up being.
It ending up being something that was self-induced so that he could be free from his dad was very sad, and, whilst very realistic for people with chronic illnesses, I do wish he had of healed from his anorexia rather than what did happen, or at least it not being portrayed as something that was his fault. I do feel like a lot of eating disorder media ends up in the characters dying because their organs are withered away, but if he was able to live? To recover from it? That would have been so beautiful to see, but I understand the author in no way owes their audience a portrayal of eating disorders like this. I guess, most times when I see eating disorders represented, most of the time I wish they weren’t, because they are always portrayed onto a character that is skinny, and withering away, when a lot of eating disorders, such as atypical anorexia, don’t have this stereotypical “look”
Neo had good days and bad days (which is definitely something so crucial to add when portraying illnesses, mental or physical, so I loved this), but I do feel like the hospital was hardly supporting him. They seemed fine with him eating basically nothing except an apple in a day and basically just let him get worse, which had me so confused. His friends were wonderful, but I feel like the fact that they were the ones getting him to eat more than the doctors at the hospital  seemed weird. And him only getting a feeding tube towards the end? I feel like he was not at all getting the help he needed. Going through an eating disorder is such an isolating experience, as I myself have discovered, so Neo not having the support system he needed and the right help makes me so emotional, and so sad for him that he has that. I just don’t understand why he was so neglected by the hospital.

And Hikari! Seperate from the romance with Sam that I honestly wasn’t the biggest fan of, Hikari’s experience with sickness, especially her depression, was just so heartbreakingly relatable and realistic for what so many people, especially kids these days are experiencing. Again though, I feel like the hospital wasn’t putting her needs in mind at all. Every meal she was given a knife, and whilst it was plastic, she still tried to use it upon herself, so that is just so odd that they would give a self harmer a tool to continue doing it. Do the people at this hospital know nothing? I still loved Hikari, because in no way was this her fault, but I do just think this hospital is so neglectful to it’s patients. Anyways, here’s my fav Hikari quotes from best girl:
“People glorify youth. Maybe that’s why [Hikari] strays from hers. They see it as a period of freedom, sex, and stupid decisions. These are the best years of your life. Enjoy them. You’ll be grateful you did. Say that to a child and watch them be reduced to a fruit, ripe, and ready for harvest. You’ll be grateful you did–that is a regretful argument made by those who look in the mirrors and see rot. This is what comes of it. People who don’t believe one could be so numb that even their disease doesn’t hurt enough.”

“So she feels her pain, her loneliness, the excruciating feeling that she is dying, but at once not dying soon enough. She grapples with her guilt and her fear and her love for me. They torture her until she can no longer bear it and must feel the pain with blood. When I stop her, she resents me. She resents me for keeping her alive. Then, it begins again, till all that’s left of her to torture is her mind thinning away with her body.”
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