My Very Own Book Mayhem

4,5 stars

I'm losing my shit. Another soul-crushing book? Why do I hate myself?

I think I might have gone through one of the largest twists of my life. I was utterly shocked. I even had to pause my reading for a couple of minutes. You know, just to take it all in.

This is a heartbreaking tale of a girl fixed on her hate... Kacey hates the perpetrators of the drunk-driving accident that killed her parents, boyfriend and best friend. Every day, she faces the nightmares, the panic attacks, the inability to touch other people's hands, to engage in any kind of intimacy. Yet she manages to fight against the tide threatening to drown her completely, all for her younger sister, Livie.

And the handsome, mysterious neighbour she falls in love with. Trent barges into her life, awakening a need and a sweetness that she thought was long buried. Old Kacey is beginning to surface once more, and it is a beautiful journey to witness.

That would be a fitting adjective for this book. Beautiful.

Pain and misery. Love and longing. They are strung together to form a realistic picture of our everyday struggles, of the dire consequences of PTSD and how sometimes people can hide all of their hurt beneath an apparently impenetrable shell. Until the right person shows up and the fissures begin to appear. 

For Kacey, Trent was that person. He brought her back to life, after four years of numbness. Beautiful.