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A review by katykelly
Never Ending by Martyn Bedford
4.0
4.5 stars
I loved the author's debut, Flip, an intelligent and thoughtful body-swap story. So I wanted to see where he went next.
This is pretty dark. But it's a topic that needs to be talked about. Grief, guilt and death are topics that teenage readers may not want to read about regularly, but Bedford has captured what a teenager might go through, at the extreme when they blame themselves for a loved one's death and need help to move through the worst pain and on into life.
I haven't given this five stars. Throughout I was nagged that there was something artificial in the writing and I twigged it halfway, reading another review. It feels like it should be written in the first person, from Siobhan's perspective. It's not, it's third person and sometimes the language feels wrong somehow. Anyway, that doesn't detract from the story.
Fifteen-year-old Siobhan (Shiv) checks herself into a therapy centre, alongside several other teenagers. Each is there because they feel responsible for the death of someone close to them - in Shiv's case, her younger brother Declan. Each of them has become a danger to themselves or others - self-harming or through public acts of violence and they are there for two months of revolutionary therapy to help them deal with what happened in their lives.
The therapy itself seems quite shocking at times (psychological, nothing physical). The story passes back and forth between Shiv in the present doing her best to immerse herself in the therapy, and to the recent past where she and her family are on the holiday that would eventually see her 12-year-old brother die. We go through Shiv's therapy with her, and only knowing her own perspective of Dec's death until very close to the end, we are as much in the dark as she is about the whole truth of her role in it.
Through the other teenagers, we see other reactions to death and grief - the overwhelming guilt leading to self-harm, eating disorders, social withdrawal - and through the therapy, how healing might be achieved.
Shiv is very honest and open but without the first person perspective it feels one-level-removed from her at times, though I didn't want to stop reading. I wanted to see for myself what happened to Dec and if Shiv really had a reason to feel such guilt.
This is a really sad tale, but with light at the end of a very dark tunnel, a book to recommend to readers as one that will make them think.
I loved the author's debut, Flip, an intelligent and thoughtful body-swap story. So I wanted to see where he went next.
This is pretty dark. But it's a topic that needs to be talked about. Grief, guilt and death are topics that teenage readers may not want to read about regularly, but Bedford has captured what a teenager might go through, at the extreme when they blame themselves for a loved one's death and need help to move through the worst pain and on into life.
I haven't given this five stars. Throughout I was nagged that there was something artificial in the writing and I twigged it halfway, reading another review. It feels like it should be written in the first person, from Siobhan's perspective. It's not, it's third person and sometimes the language feels wrong somehow. Anyway, that doesn't detract from the story.
Fifteen-year-old Siobhan (Shiv) checks herself into a therapy centre, alongside several other teenagers. Each is there because they feel responsible for the death of someone close to them - in Shiv's case, her younger brother Declan. Each of them has become a danger to themselves or others - self-harming or through public acts of violence and they are there for two months of revolutionary therapy to help them deal with what happened in their lives.
The therapy itself seems quite shocking at times (psychological, nothing physical). The story passes back and forth between Shiv in the present doing her best to immerse herself in the therapy, and to the recent past where she and her family are on the holiday that would eventually see her 12-year-old brother die. We go through Shiv's therapy with her, and only knowing her own perspective of Dec's death until very close to the end, we are as much in the dark as she is about the whole truth of her role in it.
Through the other teenagers, we see other reactions to death and grief - the overwhelming guilt leading to self-harm, eating disorders, social withdrawal - and through the therapy, how healing might be achieved.
Shiv is very honest and open but without the first person perspective it feels one-level-removed from her at times, though I didn't want to stop reading. I wanted to see for myself what happened to Dec and if Shiv really had a reason to feel such guilt.
This is a really sad tale, but with light at the end of a very dark tunnel, a book to recommend to readers as one that will make them think.