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A review by andrewrmart
The Beauty That Remains by Ashley Woodfolk
4.0
Update: A few days after recording the notes below, I’ve moved from 3 stars to 4.
I approached this cautiously (as I do with all YA lit that promises sadness) and wound up pleasantly surprised by teenage characters who definitely feel like real humans (rather than caricatures) and a tasteful exploration of grief from diverse perspectives. To that end, I am actually on the verge of 4 stars as I write this! I think this is a book that I could reasonably expect young adult students (particularly young women) to pick up on their own accord because it does a good job capturing both strong emotions/relationships in youth and strong feelings that those emotions/relationships are misunderstood by outsiders -- at one point early on, one of the narrators muses on the fact that proximity to a person is not equal to intimacy. Slowly but surely, the narrators discover all of the beauty that remains after the deaths of their loved ones, although of course they encounter troublesome roadblocks along the way. Below are some excerpted thoughts that I share with another Goodreads user:
It is hard to write a good book about grief. First, you must convince the reader of the importance of the relationship between the protagonist(s) and the deceased; make them care about a fictional dead person as much as the characters supposedly do. Then you must also, usually, create a compelling story arc out of this grief. What will happen next? Where do the characters go from here? What are we reading for? Books about grief risk becoming "concept books", in that the concept is "this character is sad" but a story doesn't grow out of it.
I think this second point is where the book struggled a little. The Beauty That Remains follows three diverse teenagers as they cope with their individual grief. Korean-American Autumn has lost her best friend, Tavia, in an accident. Black identical twins Shay and Sasha have been torn apart by the end to Sasha's long battle with leukemia. And white Logan develops a drinking problem when his ex-boyfriend and first love commits suicide.
All three narrators have individual struggles, but these start to come together and overlap as the story progresses. Each is linked, in some way, by music, and Logan's old band called Unraveling Lovely.
The author puts a lot of emotion into her characters, especially in the beginning when painting in their backstory and relationship to those who have died. Woodfolk explores what it means to lose a twin - that one person who is so closely tied to you and has been by your side all your life - and what it's like to feel like you could have prevented the death of an ex if only... if only.
It's a timely story, as each narrator uses digital technology in a different way to deal with their grief. Logan watches Bram's vlogs, Autumn sends online messages to Tavia, and Shay turns to blogging about music. About a third of the way in, however, I felt like their emotions, the "concept" of their grief had been explored exhaustively, and that the story grew a little tiresome and repetitive.
I approached this cautiously (as I do with all YA lit that promises sadness) and wound up pleasantly surprised by teenage characters who definitely feel like real humans (rather than caricatures) and a tasteful exploration of grief from diverse perspectives. To that end, I am actually on the verge of 4 stars as I write this! I think this is a book that I could reasonably expect young adult students (particularly young women) to pick up on their own accord because it does a good job capturing both strong emotions/relationships in youth and strong feelings that those emotions/relationships are misunderstood by outsiders -- at one point early on, one of the narrators muses on the fact that proximity to a person is not equal to intimacy. Slowly but surely, the narrators discover all of the beauty that remains after the deaths of their loved ones, although of course they encounter troublesome roadblocks along the way. Below are some excerpted thoughts that I share with another Goodreads user:
It is hard to write a good book about grief. First, you must convince the reader of the importance of the relationship between the protagonist(s) and the deceased; make them care about a fictional dead person as much as the characters supposedly do. Then you must also, usually, create a compelling story arc out of this grief. What will happen next? Where do the characters go from here? What are we reading for? Books about grief risk becoming "concept books", in that the concept is "this character is sad" but a story doesn't grow out of it.
I think this second point is where the book struggled a little. The Beauty That Remains follows three diverse teenagers as they cope with their individual grief. Korean-American Autumn has lost her best friend, Tavia, in an accident. Black identical twins Shay and Sasha have been torn apart by the end to Sasha's long battle with leukemia. And white Logan develops a drinking problem when his ex-boyfriend and first love commits suicide.
All three narrators have individual struggles, but these start to come together and overlap as the story progresses. Each is linked, in some way, by music, and Logan's old band called Unraveling Lovely.
The author puts a lot of emotion into her characters, especially in the beginning when painting in their backstory and relationship to those who have died. Woodfolk explores what it means to lose a twin - that one person who is so closely tied to you and has been by your side all your life - and what it's like to feel like you could have prevented the death of an ex if only... if only.
It's a timely story, as each narrator uses digital technology in a different way to deal with their grief. Logan watches Bram's vlogs, Autumn sends online messages to Tavia, and Shay turns to blogging about music. About a third of the way in, however, I felt like their emotions, the "concept" of their grief had been explored exhaustively, and that the story grew a little tiresome and repetitive.