This book has altered my perspective on life. ‘All The Bright Places’ by Jennifer Niven has been and will always be one of the most beautiful books that I’ve ever read. The book describes life in the most authentic manner possible.
The story revolves around 18-year-old Theodore Finch, who counts off his days before he falls back to the Asleep (as he refers to the blackouts that he experiences).
He meets Violet Markey on a bell tower ledge at his school and they strike a conversation, which goes haywire when Markey almost falls off. Even Finch had gone up after deciding to end his life, but he ends up saving Markey, which leads to more meetings with her until they finally fall in love.
Both of them lead dysfunctional lives, Violet has succumbed to numbness after witnessing her elder sister’s death and Finch lives with his divorced parents - his bipolar father and distressed mother and two sisters.
Quotes envelop the chapters, one of them being: “You are all colours in one, at full brightness.”
Markey learns to live again, to be herself as she is accompanied by Finch on a ‘wandering Indiana project’, as Finch puts it.
The book helps us discover beauty in the little things in life and gives us a different perspective on everything. Through the book, we are constantly thinking of all the downfalls in our lives, but how light seems to shine through it all and sometimes the people who we think we know are not actually the people we know at all.
— The reader is a student based in Sharjah.
