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aveemh 's review for:
Once and for All
by Sarah Dessen
Actual rating: 3.5
Before I start commenting on anything, I would advise all readers to look for the trigger warnings of this book, or what the heavy topics are in it. Please take care of your mental health.
“Once and for All” dealt with grief after losing someone. One thing I know about grief is that is not the same for everyone, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Based on that belief, I will only comment on Louna’s journey to healing that it was a painful process to witness. I can’t imagine what is like to go through what she went through with Ethan. The healing felt slow, sometimes backing on its own. I related to that quite a lot. To me, that kind of grief felt ultimately real.
Louna and Ambrose didn’t hit it off from the beginning, and quite frankly, I liked that. The animosity between them (sometimes one-sided from Louna’s part) seemed just right to me. Ambrose never made it easy for Louna to like him—he was irritating, uncommon, simply odd. He was aware that he was a peculiar person that not everyone liked.
I like the steps Louna took. How it seemed that she progressed from what she had with Ethan (such an epic love story) to what bloomed with Ambrose (totally unorthodox and not what someone would expect). It took a little while for that to work, since Louna (and mostly people who grief someone they loved) truly idealized every single moment she spent with Ethan, which prevented her from crawling out of the sadness in which she was for so long.
This story took me a while to digest because it carries a very heavy topic. I had to sit and think about for a couple of days. I sincerely liked it, even though sometimes it felt a bit slow and that things weren’t actually moving, but isn’t that what grief is? That things are never in motion until, someday, at their own pace, they start moving once more?
Before I start commenting on anything, I would advise all readers to look for the trigger warnings of this book, or what the heavy topics are in it. Please take care of your mental health.
“Once and for All” dealt with grief after losing someone. One thing I know about grief is that is not the same for everyone, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Based on that belief, I will only comment on Louna’s journey to healing that it was a painful process to witness. I can’t imagine what is like to go through what she went through with Ethan. The healing felt slow, sometimes backing on its own. I related to that quite a lot. To me, that kind of grief felt ultimately real.
Louna and Ambrose didn’t hit it off from the beginning, and quite frankly, I liked that. The animosity between them (sometimes one-sided from Louna’s part) seemed just right to me. Ambrose never made it easy for Louna to like him—he was irritating, uncommon, simply odd. He was aware that he was a peculiar person that not everyone liked.
I like the steps Louna took. How it seemed that she progressed from what she had with Ethan (such an epic love story) to what bloomed with Ambrose (totally unorthodox and not what someone would expect). It took a little while for that to work, since Louna (and mostly people who grief someone they loved) truly idealized every single moment she spent with Ethan, which prevented her from crawling out of the sadness in which she was for so long.
This story took me a while to digest because it carries a very heavy topic. I had to sit and think about for a couple of days. I sincerely liked it, even though sometimes it felt a bit slow and that things weren’t actually moving, but isn’t that what grief is? That things are never in motion until, someday, at their own pace, they start moving once more?