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booksthatburn's review against another edition
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? Yes
5.0
WE WERE RESTLESS THINGS is about the strangeness of grief, of continuing after someone else has stopped, and the impossibility of keeping someone happily where they don’t want to be.
Link died before the book opens, drowning in the woods, dying in a camera-shy lake that’s only sometimes there. His sister and friends slowly move into new configurations in his absence, jostled by the void he left behind. Complicating thing is the new kid, Jonas, who didn’t ask to fill Link’s seat but nevertheless must answer the implicit question of replacement.
By switching perspectives throughout, no one character takes over the narrative, and every one of them is described at least once through someone else’s understanding of them. One of the characters is working through her wants and needs as far as a romantic and/or sexual relationship, including whether she wants either, neither, or both of those things. It’s refreshing in a way that simply declaring a label at her introduction wouldn’t be. She has important conversations with other characters where they discuss the particulars of what any of this means for her, what their own desires mean for them, and it feels like it would help a reader maybe untangle some of their own thoughts on love and sex, including when and whether they’re separate. By the time more precise terms are used they get to be a succinct way to label what her words and actions have already made abundantly clear.
By the end I think Gaetan became my favorite character. Early on he’s shown from the perspective of characters who don’t understand him. When so much of the early book is through Jonas who just met him it means that the reader takes a long time to learn anything about Gaetan other than his bleeding edges which are sharp enough to cut. Jonas is sweet but aimless, bumbling into existing dynamics without pausing to assess the space before entering it. He tends to notice that his presence changed things, but often takes a long time to ask what was there before. By the time he does, the others have moved on to react to the new status quo.
I love the ending. It leaves the characters in a place that’s better than where they started, but without trying to fix everything that is wrong.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Animal death, Child death, Death, Bullying, Body horror, Vomit, and Misogyny
Minor: Confinement, Sexual harassment, Drug use, Violence, Fire/Fire injury, Child abuse, Self harm, and Suicide
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