Before I Let Go: A Review

Before I Let Go by Marieke Nijkamp

My Rating: 4/5 Stars!

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Publish Date: January 2nd, 2018

Received: Netgalley provided an e-arc in exchange for an honest review

Purchase: Amazon

Synopsis:

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends comes an intense story of loss and the quest for truth

Corey and her best friend, Kyra, are inseparable. Corey is the only person who understands Kyra’s high-highs and low-lows. So when Corey’s family moves away from their Alaskan town, she makes Kyra promise to stay strong during the long, dark winters and wait for her return.  Except Kyra doesn’t.

Two days before Corey is to visit, Kyra is found floating underneath the ice.

While everyone in Lost Creek deems Kyra’s death a suicide, Corey knows something is wrong. With every hour, her suspicion grows. The town is keeping secrets—chilling secrets. But piecing together the truth about what happened to Kyra may prove as difficult as lighting the sky in an Alaskan winter…

Opening Sentence: “The airplane’s engines rumble.”

Musings:

Before I Fall is a mixture of magical, strange, cult, and a feeling of wrongness. From the moment Corey steps back into her old town to the moment the ending occurred things felt simply wrong.

Honestly when I was first reading this book I was almost put off by the strangeness of it all. Every relationship in this book, every person that appeared said and did things that simply felt off and so wrong to me. So much so that when I first put down this book I only had it at a three star rating. However, now after it has been over a month since I read Before I Fall or really even thought of it much I can appreciate the story so much better.

Yes Before I Fall is strange and causes a stirring of uncomfortable feeling when you first read it, but that’s what makes it so good. Your not really meant to truly like anyone in this novel. The slow descent into madness that this story goes into is meant to make you feel like you have your skin crawling in a weird way.

Before I Fall is an eclectic novel that blurs reality and magic and becomes something almost akin to an abstract painting. There are o many questions left unanswered (as far as the community and the magic and overall strangeness not about plot), so many things that make you think back later about the story in a similar way you would a dream.

Before I Fall is far from perfect, but i find myself having warmed up to it after distancing myself from it. It is uncomfortable and eccentric, but in those ways I have found myself appreciating it for what it is.

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below!

-till next time!