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Review: Before I Let Go

Before I let go, by Marieke Nijkamp, is a chilling story about a girl who returns to her Alaskan hometown to mourn her friend's death. The girl is Corey, and her friend is Kyra. Much of the story is told in the past tense though conversations between them, mostly revolving around Kyra's bipolar disorder.
Writing -
The writing in before I let go was what I would describe as "no style." For me, this means that there was nothing that I hated about it. There were a lot of lines that were very quoteable, but they were sort of awkward inserted into what was supposed to be everyday dialogue between Corey and Kyra.

Characters - 
Corey and Kyra were the only real characters, and they both just had an arbitrary trait assigned to them as their character. Kyra constantly talked about how she was more than her disorder, but her character really wasn't. All of the memories that Corey had of her revolved around her talking about it. (Or Corey talking about astronomy and Kyra talking about painting.) Everyone in Lost (The town.) was virtually the same. They just had names and jobs.
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Plot - 
The premise of this was actually super interesting, but it didn't really turn into anything. The actions of the characters were really redundant, so you were sort of left in the same place that you started at the end of the book. It also fell apart at the end, but I'll get more into that later. It was compelling up until a point, when you sort of wondered why you were even still reading.

 Diversity - 
Although some people may disagree with judging a book on it's diversity, I'm not actually going to deduct any stars for it. As was with her other book, the diversity was sort of just sprinkled in there. When all characters are assigned a trait or a hobby, you can easily assign them with something like "Indian" or "Pansexual"  and have it mean nothing to the story. There was diversity, but it could have been better written. (Which isn't to say that all diversity must have a meaning, just that all characters should be well thought out.)

Misc- 
If you haven't read the book, this won't make sense to you. However, the ending was awful. The character motivations made no sense, and "collective insanity" or "a mysterious town" don't do much in the way of an actual ending. It also wasn't a mystery.
We got no look into Corey's past in lost not related to Kyra, and the whole town seemed to have forgotten about it as well, so we really just get a one sided look at what happened from a sort of unreliable narrator. (Though she wasn't unreliable enough to add any tension to the story.)
The setting could have been atmospheric, but again, it was just traits put together.

Rating - 
2/5 stars. This could have been really good, but a lot of it just fell too flat for me for it to leave an impact. I didn't enjoy myself while reading, although it was fairly readable. I'll probably read Nijkamp's next book, because this was much better than her first one and I look forward to her improvement.
         Thank you for reading!
                                        - Sarah


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