Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls by Lynn Weingarten
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
"No, if you run away, they never stop looking for you. You still exist, trapped in your life. But if you die . . ." Her voice is soft and sweet. She turns toward me. She smiles. "Junie, you're free."
I basically gobbled this book in two days - two straight days.
"Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls" is a 2015 YA thriller that dares you to go to the most dangerous places when you lose your loved one. June, our innocent protagonist, finds out that someone long estranged, someone she used to be BFFs with, has killed herself. She never left things the way she wanted the last time she talked to Delia, and now that Delia's dead, she's plagued by both the loose strings and the deep loss. She doesn't know how else to cope other than digging around to make sense of her friend's sudden decision, only to discover that it all seemed like a setup. Delia, the daredevil that rocked her world the moment she entered her life, is terrified of fire. She always knew this for a fact. She couldn't have burned herself to death, June thought. She must have been murdered.
And that's where our story begins.
"I had so many chances to fix things between us. So many chances that I didn't take. Whatever was going on in her life, if I had been there, I would have kept her safe."
It always works that way, doesn't it? The moment you let your curiosity get the better of you, you're automatically defeated by your own demons.
It only took the synopsis to have me sold, and even after I'm finished, I still found myself thinking so much about it for the next couple of weeks. It's nothing like what I had in mind. The sheer weight of darkness "Suicide Notes" touched upon was petrifying. For me, at least. I mean it's a YA book, I didn't expect the themes to be much of a heavyweight, but you get it all - very graphic violence, lots of sex (same- and opposite-sex), strong language and loads of drinking, drugs, and smoking. Yet it's not the explicit content that scared the heck out of me. Nor does it have a razzle-dazzle plot (great twists though). It was Weingarten's simple way of words and uh-maz-iiingly well-developed, highly-believable, three-dimensional characters, one of which I'd say is the face of pure evil herself, that became highly effective drivers of the story. I secretly think this is the result of the author's personal experiment on character study, specifically damaged young girls. And deliver she did, carried through complex, sometimes difficult-to-sympathize emotions so beautifully because storytelling-wise, Weingarten also slayed it IMO. The book alternates between the present-day and flashbacks, interspersed with segments told in the omniscient voice, and altogether the story seamlessly unfolds the layered motivations of its characters.
There is this one segment that I think perfectly captures the whole essence of the book. The scene here is a fairly simple one, but functions like a metaphor for the fast-paced, emotively thrilling and fundamentally destructive journey you're about to embark upon:
"Delia tipped her head to the side as if she was considering something. She raked her curls behind her ear, hiked up her low-slung cutoff shorts, then reached out and took June's hand. She squeezed it tight, but still she didn't say anything at all. She just grinned and waggled her eyebrows.
Then she started to run.
And because she was holding June's hand so tightly, and June's hand was attached to June's arm, which was attached to June's body, June had no choice but to run with her. She stumbled at first, adrenaline coursing through her veins as she plunged toward the ground, then righted herself. Delia was ahead of her, arm stretched back, racing across the empty field, legs pumping, pulling June right along.
"Wait!" June begged. "Please!" June was in flip-flops. They were flapping against the grass until she accidentally ran right out of one of them. "I lost my shoe!"
But Delia didn't wait or stop.
"Fuck your shoe!" Delia called out.
So what could she do? June kicked off the other one and pumped her legs. When was the last time she ran as fast as she could?
"But where are we GOING?" June shouted.
"WE'RE JUST RUNNING," Delia shouted. Trees zipping by them, they were flying through the air.
The pit in June's stomach dissolved, sweat broke out along her back, her lungs were bursting. But still they ran, giddy and breathless, the pieces of June's life dropping away bit by bit, until she was nothing but legs in motion, arms, a heart, a hand, held. A body, stumbling, tripping, almost falling. Except she wouldn't fall, that's the thing. Delia wouldn't let her.
Accolades of "Suicide Notes" include:
- being on The New York Times Bestseller list and stay on it for five weeks
- a YALSA Teens' Top Ten book for 2016
- on Vanity Fair's list of Best Books
- on The Guardian's list of 5 of the Best in Young Adult Fiction
- on Amazon UK's list of Best Books of The Month: Young Adult
And you know what? Even after hyping about it for the past six paragraphs or so, I still don't recommend it … if you're the general escapist fiction reader. Subjects are morally ambiguous, very very very dark, and I believe the better part of you will revolt against it by the end. But that's what makes falling from grace so alluring. And truth is, every great sin is done in the name of love.
"But I remind myself that loving someone doesn't always mean telling them everything. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a person is to shield them and then carry the burden yourself, bear that weight so they don't have to. I know she will forgive me."
Definitely recommend this book for those of you who want to know what it's like to be brave enough to set yourselves free from the laws and orders of this world ...
Love, Stace
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