We'll Never Be Apart
by Emiko Jean
Hardcover, 279 pages
HMH Books, October 6, 2015
2 stars
While committed to a mental institution, charged with a crime of which she claims she is innocent, seventeen-year-old Alice Monroe struggles to regain her memories of the night a fire killed her boyfriend. Convinced that her sister Cellie is actually responsible for the blaze and is being housed at the same facility, Alice decides to find her and put an end to their destructive relationship once and for all.
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"So where does a story that ends in fire and death begin? It begins in the snow on the coldest day of the coldest winter of the last fifty years on their sixth birthday in a silent house. It begins with a body."
Let me start by saying that I'm not generally a fan of YA novels. This one had a good amount of buzz surrounding it, though, and it seemed to have an interesting premise. It's a debut novel, so I expected bumps. This novel, however. starts out dark and atmospheric and then starts to fade pretty quickly into a giant, predictable cliche. I am not exaggerating when I say that I guessed the "twist" ending from reading the epilogue. The foreshadowing in this book is about a subtle as a fire alarm. After giving away the farm in the first few pages, the book then manages to continue on for 270-odd pages about a character in a mental institution with zero insight into any kind of mental health issues. I can handle a bad "twist" if the book at least offers some kind of peek into mental illness or a unique look into issues like the ones facing the protagonists (and there were *so* many to choose from here). This book offered none of that, unfortunately. It relied almost entirely on the suspense building to the big reveal at the end, and, to be honest, even if the ending hadn't been so obvious from the start, the twist was so unoriginal that it would likely have been a disappointment anyway.
The plot also falls apart in several big ways. We're told from the start that Alice's goal is to regain her memories from the night of the fire and find her sister. A solid two-thirds of the book revolves around her budding romantic relationship with another boy at the hospital. It's an odd turn of events for someone who is supposedly so hellbent on finding her sister who she believes to be housed in the same facility. When given the opportunity to sneak around at night, she and her new guy end up on the roof chatting, in the kitchen fixing sandwiches, and wandering the grounds. Some of this gallivanting took place the night before Alice was to attend the funeral of her boyfriend, the love of her life, who had died a week or two earlier. For someone we're told is devastated by this loss, the speed of her new-found relationship is a big problem. Also, apparently this hospital has no security whatsoever because *none* of that is something two kids in a locked-down mental institution should be able to do. Razors were hidden in rooms, key cards easily lifted from several different staff members, locked rooms being broken into, patient files stolen...I mean, at this point that hospital should just be shut down for sheer incompetence in care.
I could go on but there's not much point. In the end, the book was a quick read with a not-terribly-complicated writing style. However, because of a weak, nonsensical plot, I can't recommend it to anyone. Hopefully Jean's subsequent work will be more well-constructed. I'm unlikely to read another.
My beverage recommendation for this book is a tequila shot or two. Our protagonist indulges in some during a party in her childhood and it could help make you care less about the plot holes you're wandering through.
My backlist bump for this book includes All The Bright Places by Jennifer Niven (a YA novel that actually explores mental health issues in teens, including depression and PTSD) or Shutter Island (a suspense/thriller also set in a mental institution that will keep you up at night with it's creepy plot and shocking ending).
