From BookTok to ASHS’s very own library, All the Bright Places is a popular read seen practically everywhere. However, a book this popular leaves plenty of room for questions as to if the book is as important and beautiful as it is made out to be. Below is my take on All the Bright Places.

This dual perspective YA novel focuses on a romance between two unlikely high school seniors, Violet and Finch, who become close and fall in love while working on a school project centered around touring their home state of Indianna. One dark truth lingers between them and draws them together: they met while each on the ledge of their school’s bell tower, debating whether to jump off. While Finch helps Violet see the beauty in life and cope with her grief after her sister’s death, he also has mental health struggles of his own, which greatly affect their relationship.

When I first started the book, it was hard for me to get into the budding romance between Finch and Violet. While Violet was extremely disinterested in Finch and much preferred to ignore this reminder of her breaking point on the ledge, Finch continued to pressure her into developing a relationship: from forcing her to pair with him for a school project to pressuring her into talking to him (a near stranger at the time) about traumatic events in her life, not to mention the times he showed up at her house at night either unannounced or against specific instructions not to come and threw rocks at her window to get her out of bed.

Despite the forced feeling of their relationship at first, Violet quickly started to warm up to Finch in a way that indicated that her pushing him away was less about dislike for him and more of a way of ignoring her memory of standing on the ledge. While Finch still should have respected her boundaries and none of the things he did would have been cute or romantic in real life, in the book, these actions made the relationship even more adorable as Violet fell slowly, but hard, for Finch. The book creates a strong, beautiful, and loving friendship and romance between the two characters while sharing a touching and informative story about mental health. It’s definitely worth a shot!