Tuesday, February 28, 2017

We Come Apart by Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan

Title: We Come Apart
Author: Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Source: Bloomsbury
Goodreads


From two acclaimed authors comes an emotional story told in verse about friendship, love, and overcoming unbeatable odds.

Authors Brian Conaghan and Sarah Crossan have joined forces to tell the story of Nicu and Jess, two troubled teens whose paths cross in the unlikeliest of places.

Nicu has emigrated from Romania and is struggling to find his place in his new home. Meanwhile, Jess's home life is overshadowed by violence. When Nicu and Jess meet, what starts out as friendship grows into romance as the two bond over their painful pasts and hopeful futures. But will they be able to save each other, let alone themselves?
For fans of Una LaMarche’s Like No Other, this illuminating story told in dual points of view through vibrant verse will stay with readers long after they've turned the last page.
Review by Nara

I have to admit, I'm really not the biggest fan of verse novels. I haven't read too many of them, but the ones I've read I have struggled somewhat with the writing style and the idea that it's poetry when it basically seems like sentences that have been broken off in random places.  Nicu's point of view was especially difficult to read, firstly because of being written in verse and secondly because his English was not that great and the proper grammarian in me was twitching every time something was written incorrectly.

We Come Apart is a very quick read, as expected of a verse novel. It definitely looks longer than it actually is, and I breezed through it in a couple of hours. The story itself was pretty average, and I came out of the novel not really knowing what the point of it was, or what sort of message it was trying to show me. I was not interested in either character, and could not care less what happened to them.

The book mainly focuses on Jess and Nicu's developing friendship, as well as the expectations that Nicu's family puts on him vs the abusive family that Jess is from. Both families are obviously not role model families, and this means that Jess and Nicu are both quite isolated. I wasn't the biggest fan of their romance because it didn't seem particularly well developed to me. Likely because the writing was difficult to get into, making it hard to actually care about the characters.

Unfortunately, this was just a book that was not for me. I struggle with verse novels at the best of times, but the story of We Come Apart was not good enough for me to overcome the difficulty of reading in verse.


It was okay
Ratings
Overall: 3/10
Plot: 1/5
Romance: 1/5
Writing: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Cover: 3/5