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A review by withlovejoy
Where the Light Goes by Sara Barnard
challenging
emotional
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Have you ever thought about how you only truly know one version of a person? How you will never know your best friend like others know her? How you will never see your mother the way your little brother sees her? How you will only know the things about your grandma she wants you to know, but not the ones her best friend in high school knew about her, a memory long forgotten, buried beneath all the stress of becoming an adult?
Trigger warning: mentions of suicide.
In Where the Light Goes we follow Emmy, Em, Embop on her very own journey of grieving her older sister Beth. Beth the superstar. Beth the druggie. Beth the scandalous one. Beth, the singer, who suffered from all the fame and was too depressed to see any way of her life ever becoming better and decided to take her own life, leaving behind her younger sister.
This is a story you don't read. You fully experience it. The sadness, anger and frustrations that the protagonist feels, you feel too. Not only through the writing, which was exceptionally, but also through the formatting. The way the font and spacing was used made this book feel lively, the Emmy's emotions felt more real and closer to your heart. If her thoughts were jumbled, so was the text. Words littered all over the page, a single big word taking up all the space or tweets that Emmy reads, all these things made this read an experience I believe I will never have again when reading another book.
Many important topics were touched in this book and each one of them was handled with so much care, I just know that the author has spent a lot of time dedicated to researching and informing herself. On the one hand there is obviously grief and the many different ways people will deal with the traumatic loss of a sister, daughter, friend. Then there's how fame can ruin people, how cruel the music industry is and how hate and rumors can ruin a person. I believe this is especially important right now with social media on an all time high, when it's so easy for people to spread hate in the comforts of anonymity.
To me however, the most important and impactful message is that we will never fully know anyone. We will only see parts of all the people in our life, taking these pieces and gluing them together, creating our very own version of them. Someone else might know a different version of them, a better one, a more complex one, simply another one. But that doesn't't mean that the version we know of a person is any less real than any of the other ones. And that's okay because isn't that what makes each and every one of us so unique?
Trigger warning: mentions of suicide.
In Where the Light Goes we follow Emmy, Em, Embop on her very own journey of grieving her older sister Beth. Beth the superstar. Beth the druggie. Beth the scandalous one. Beth, the singer, who suffered from all the fame and was too depressed to see any way of her life ever becoming better and decided to take her own life, leaving behind her younger sister.
This is a story you don't read. You fully experience it. The sadness, anger and frustrations that the protagonist feels, you feel too. Not only through the writing, which was exceptionally, but also through the formatting. The way the font and spacing was used made this book feel lively, the Emmy's emotions felt more real and closer to your heart. If her thoughts were jumbled, so was the text. Words littered all over the page, a single big word taking up all the space or tweets that Emmy reads, all these things made this read an experience I believe I will never have again when reading another book.
Many important topics were touched in this book and each one of them was handled with so much care, I just know that the author has spent a lot of time dedicated to researching and informing herself. On the one hand there is obviously grief and the many different ways people will deal with the traumatic loss of a sister, daughter, friend. Then there's how fame can ruin people, how cruel the music industry is and how hate and rumors can ruin a person. I believe this is especially important right now with social media on an all time high, when it's so easy for people to spread hate in the comforts of anonymity.
To me however, the most important and impactful message is that we will never fully know anyone. We will only see parts of all the people in our life, taking these pieces and gluing them together, creating our very own version of them. Someone else might know a different version of them, a better one, a more complex one, simply another one. But that doesn't't mean that the version we know of a person is any less real than any of the other ones. And that's okay because isn't that what makes each and every one of us so unique?