A review by whatbritreads
And The Stars Were Burning Brightly by Danielle Jawando

2.0

Please note this book contains very triggering content around bullying and mental health and there is a very graphic description of someone ending their own life within the first 10 pages. Be safe lovelies x.

While I appreciate what this book was trying to do and the overall message it put out into the world, my enjoyment wasn’t there at all unfortunately and though this should’ve been a quick and easy read, pushing through it to get to the end felt like a real slog. Alongside my lack of enjoyment, I just don’t think it was overly well put together.

The writing here was very average and most of it felt very inconsistent. We had characters randomly saying some words in an abbreviated and almost slang-like manner, but most of their dialect was written normally. I understand writing teenagers who use slang and their own dialect, but at least make it a common theme throughout the book and include more of it rather than two words (wot and summat being the only two I can think that were repeated. It also confused me that not only was their speech written like that, being their internal monologue. It just confused me a little bit and made the reading experience a bit jolting for my taste.

The characterisation in here was very jumpy and I didn’t see much development taking place at all. It has a dual perspective but it was really difficult to tell the two voices apart, they were essentially the same voice. Within these two voices, we also get an unnecessary romance forming between them which just felt really odd given the circumstances the characters find themselves in and their mutual relationships. I just felt very weird about all of it and couldn’t really understand what was motivating the characters at all to act the way they were. The romance as well came out of absolutely nowhere and felt so abrupt I didn’t even get chance to process it.

The main focus of this book is teenagers but they were written so poorly in my opinion. A lot that happens feels so out of character and stereotypical of kids that it didn’t feel like a true reflection of how things would happen in this situation. A lot of actions and speech was so exaggerated and over the top that it made me cringe a little bit.

Though I can very much appreciate what this book was trying to demonstrate and educate surrounding bullying and suicide, I felt like it missed the mark a little bit in its execution of that. It all just felt so surface level that we never reach any safe conclusions or strong forward messages about what’s happened, how the characters are processing it and how they plan to move forward. It just felt like it got stuck a bit. There was also no outside help or relief for the characters and they just felt stuck inside this loop of hatred and terrible experiences. It was a really disheartening book and while the ending was supposed to be hopeful it didn’t feel very so.

All in all, this book just didn’t do it for me which is super surprising considering every other review I'm seeing of this from people I trust is super high.