NicoleR.M.M.'s Reviews > Suicide Watch

With a title like this, you know you have to be in a certain mood to choose this as your next book to read. For some reason I was craving some deeply, heartfelt story's this past week, and this book did meet my expectations.
I don't think I need to say you have to be aware of the triggers, because with a word like 'suicide' in the title, you already know what this book is about. It's also a story about teenagers, and maybe that makes this book harder to read, as a mother of a troubled teenager myself. I still think the teenage years are the toughest challenges we face as a human. Finding your place in this world, thinking about your future and how you want it to look like. Needing to feel accepted for who you are, having peers to belong to. I think they are the most confusing years you have to get through.

So, having said that, this book touches all these subjects and more.
The sudden passing of his care taker leaves Vincent all alone. He's just 18 years of age, has been tossed around from one foster parent to another, and now he finally found someone who really wanted to take care of him, and he loses her. She leaves him some money, but a stranger to how the world around him really works, he has difficulty finding his footage. He also remembers how he watched a girl jump off a bridge about a year ago, and he starts to think that making that same choice would wash away all his problems and emotions he doesn't allow himself to feel.
Through a pro-suicide forum he meets other young people debating the same thing and he befriends Casper and Adam. Casper knows she isn't going to live much longer because the cancer in her body is no longer treatable and Adam comes from a difficult home, where his father passed away a few years ago and his mother couldn't care less about him. She's a harsh woman, violent even, and he even doubts whether she would miss him if he would just make an end to everything.

I liked how this author created their characters - very real and honest. The story is told from Vincent's pov and it was easy to connect to him, hearing his thoughts, being inside his head. Knowing why he does what he does. I was glad that he had Harold, his foster-mother's friend and lawyer, an adult who kept an eye out on him, even when Vince wanted to keep him at a distant for a long while. I loved how Vincent and Adam slowly grew into their friendship and their falling in love, and I loved Casper's no nonsense attitude, even when she sometimes let her guards down and we were shown her vulnerability.

This is not a happy book, but it does have an overall hopeful feeling. It leaves you hopeful. You witness how Vince and Adam slowly start to believe in a future, start to see that this shitty life they're leading is only temporarily, that it's up to themselves to make something out of it and leave things behind. It was good to see (and believable too) how their mindset slowly changed.
It's not that this book ends with a hea, but I do think it ends on a hopeful note that I think we could consider to be a hfn. And that's maybe what makes this book powerful with a life lesson that's worth something: how bad life may seem at that moment, it's in your own power to change things and make them better if you want them to be. It's not easy, that's not the message, but it's possible if you believe in yourself.

Once upon a time, I lost everything, and I was so alone. The sadness, the hurt, it all seemed so infinite. When you're wandering alone in a storm, you can't see the end, or if there even is one, and how close it might be. I'm still wandering, but maybe I don't feel so lost now.