You've probably guessed this already, but it's not a romance. This is a book about that insidious form of emotional abuse that grows, slowly, out of a relationship you thought was wonderful. Very few authors manage to portray this right, I think. Very few successfully show how someone can fall in love with a person who is manipulating and hurting them. Bourne does, though, and it makes for an emotional and skin-crawling read. The Chapter names- They are all based on the names of the places or the reasons why she cried and absolutely no idea why, but I loved them. The way it is written- The Book is about Amelia trying to get over Reese and to do that, she makes a map connecting all the places she has cried in public because of him. Every paragraph of Amelia visiting a new place is followed by another one about why she cried in the first place

Girls cry on park benches. Girls cry in train station waiting-rooms. They cry on the dance floor of clubs. It was a rollercoaster of emotions and it was extremely difficult in some places to read what Amelie had to go through. This book really does make you think about certain things when it comes to love. Amelie and Reese are in a relationship and it appears to be the "All Consuming" type of love. There's some very and not so subtle nods to what is happening and the more I read the more I just knew what was going to happen (well part of it) and my heart well and truly broke.

About YoungMinds

This week I have chosen to read The Places I’ve Cried in Public by Holly Bourne from the YA Book Prize Shortlist 2020. This is a story of Amelie and the boy she loved first (Alfie) and the boy she loved second (Reese). It is the story of Amelie’s journey through the locations that she’s cried to discover why loving Reese was so painful, confusing and frightening and not at all like loving Alfie, who was safe, comforting and gentle.

lastly, i just need to mention the writing. if i'll ever write a book i want to be able to write like that, so effortlessly, seamlessly, intimately and beautifully. Because of that, it took me a bit to get into the story. Nevertheless, I definitely wanted to finish it and over the course of the book, the story started to get better, especially the last part of it. I definitely got emotionally connected to Amelie, understood how she felt and was very proud as she started to understand that all of what happened wasn’t her fault. The way Reese treated her started to make me feel angry and I just wished I could tell her to run away from him. The only reason this isn’t a whooping 5-stars is because this was still quite a difficult read at times, because of the themes of the story. Still 200% recommending this, if you can handle the trigger warnings. Reading it in my perspective, at first it seemed so shallow, so irrelevant and honestly I was a bit disappointed about the reason for of all Amelie's crying, that it was after all about a stupid boy. I assumed it would be more profound. But as I read further, it was actually everything I was expecting. It was in fact very relevant and meaningful and so necessary. I shouldn't have doubted Holly Bourne because she is amazingly adept at writing about teenage crisis, about what it feels to fall in love at that age. If the focus really is on Amelie and Reese’s relationship in this book, I liked the place the secondary characters took in the story. From the caring music teacher to the friendship Amelie develops, destroys and mends with Hannah, I appreciated seeing this very much, as well.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. This book is about a teenage girl called Amelie who adores music and vintage cardigans. She has just ended a relationship with a guy called Reese (who is literally the devil but more on that later) and she is completely and utterly broken by it. I really enjoyed that the narrative was told in dual timelines - and I liked that we learnt what happened during the relationship and how it began at the same time as knowing what Amelie was currently going through. Holly Bourne definitely knew how to weave the timelines together so it flowed naturally and didn’t take me out of the story. It was also told in second person, with Amelie speaking directly to Reese, which I thought was a nice and unique touch.

As it turns out, they are the result of a radioactive relationship full of thorns and punctured dreams. One day you’d be all over me, making my anxiety disappear, being kind and considerate and amazing and everything I’d always wanted. “God I love you, I love you so much,” you’d tell everyone at the lunch table, and the rest of the band would groan while I glowed. But then, later that afternoon, we’d walk past a girl and you’d say, “Wow, she’s so pretty,” then get in a mood with me if I dared to be upset.The trademark heartbreaking Holly Bourne moment I’ve come to expect near the climax of every book happens here too, of course, when Amelie visits her old friends in Sheffield and Everything Goes Horribly Wrong. One reason I read these books so fast is simply because I need to get through them as fast as possible, like ripping off a band-aid, because these are emotionally draining books. And yes, Amelie certainly makes mistakes—she is, like all of us, flawed on top of being young and inexperienced in these things, and I appreciate that we get lots of facets of her character. She screws up bad with Alfie; she gets her former best friend upset … it’s a whole thing. There are a few other details that really make this book stand out. A very well done and important book, please be warned that this book does contain Trigger Warning, and if you would like me to tell them to you my inbox is always open.

Every time I start another Holly Bourne book, I’m scared. I think, “Is this the time? Is this the book where Bourne lets me down, and I have to be disappointed??” And the answer is always no, as it is with The Places I’ve Cried in Public. I read this mostly in private, but otherwise there would have been some public tears, let me tell you. So we go on this journey to figure out what happened in the relationship and what its downfalls were. It's told in a past and present narrative and we see her analysing the relationship through an internal monologue.

Something that I feel I took away from this, is the power of friendship, Amelie had so many bad things happen and the friendships that came from this, was such light in a dark book. David Almond introduces his new picture book, A Way to the Stars, a story about perseverance and finding a way to make dreams come true. I think this book is a very important contemporary novel, but I cannot say I enjoyed reading it. I think I need to say straight off the bat, that the synopsis of this book is quite vague and it makes it sound essentially just like a break up story; but I must say that in my opinion this novel is a very tragic story of a rape and abuse victim coping with PTSD. Okay this is a tough one to review. It’s one in the morning and I am tired, but I NEEDED to finish this story. This is something that needs to be told. I personally related to Amelie in a number of ways. Both of us are Yorkshire girls, both of us left the comfort of the world we knew to go to the south of England where people say "bath" like "barf", yet make fun of our accents, and don't know that gravy on chips is the best thing ever. For Amelie, though, the change was much harder. She left her friends and loving boyfriend right in the middle of her A levels, out of necessity for her dad's job. She went to a new town and school where she had no friends, no support group, no one to "get" her and make her feel important.