Best friends Noelle and Keeley have been inseparable for practically forever. While they were always two, they were often three: Noelle's twin brother, Nadio, was the third in their trio.
But after Kelley returns from a summer in England -- the first time that she and Noelle have been away from each other for more than a few days -- everything is different.
In alternating voices, Noelle and Nadio tell a story about: the end a friendship that had seemed unbreakable, about the beginning of a romance that crept up on everyone, about quiet estrangement, about secrets and lies, pain and first love, about what family is and about how who we are shifts and changes, again and again and again.
From This is What I Want to Tell You:
Noelle:
I can't tell you exactly what happened, but I can tell you part of it.
My part.
I once read that you should always write about what you know, that what you know will tell the best story. What I know now is that the stories people tell are always about our insecurities, about the things we left behind, and about the things we wish we could do again. The real story isn't about what you know; it's about what you wish you knew then.
Nadio:
It is hard to picture what last summer felt like. I know I was someone else then and I probably couldn't have imagined who I'd become--who we'd all become--but now that I know, part of me wants to remind myself what it was like before. I told Noelle about the way I'd written to our father, on invisible pages but with permanent ink. We need to do that, she said, we need to tell this story, even if the pages are invisible.
I started reading this one and it just... grabbed hold of me. I read from the first page to the last and I didn't put it down once. Nadio and Noelle have voices that are distinct -- I never mistook one for the other even though the author used the same style (very spare on the punctuation, no quotation marks) throughout -- but also similar. They echo and complement each other, in realization and experience. And although we never get to see the world through Keeley's eyes, her emotions and experiences are a slightly-not-parallel version of Noelle's.
I saw a review that called this book 'melodramatic', which I really don't agree with -- while there are events that could have come off that way, I felt that the writing was so strong and the characters were so real that it never veered in that direction. Many times, I knew what mistakes the characters were making -- mistakes that I've seen characters make a million times before -- but I never felt even remotely frustrated with them or with the book. Maybe because I really believed in them, believed that they were all figuring these things out for the first time.
What more can I say? Something -- a lot of things -- in this book resonated with me. And I don't think I'll be alone in that.
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Book source/other info: Review copy from the publisher; Cybils nominee; read for the RRRead-a-thon.
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