Before I Let Go by Marieke Nijkamp

Lost Creek, Alaska

I’ve got a lot of feels about this one guys. For being such a bland, uninteresting novel that I will probably never think about again after this review, it really made me angry.

7 months ago, Corey, 17, moved away from her very small Alaskan hometown of Lost Creek. While at boarding school, Corey finds out that her best friend Kyra has died, most likely from suicide. She rushes back home to find out what happened, but she is now an outsider in the eyes of her hometown and things are not how they appear.

The novel drags on and on. The “hints” and foreshadowing left throughout the novel to make it seem like a mystery/thriller end up being exactly what they seem to be. Therefore, the novel could have been much shorter. So I won’t put you through the same BS.

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Kyra struggled for several years with severe bipolar disorder. We don’t learn much about her because the character development in this book sucks, but on her manic days when she struggled with restless energy, she liked to paint. Her real passion was learning about stories (that word is used about 4 million times in this book) and connecting with people. After Corey left, the town discovered that Kyra could predict the future via her painting (prior to this discovery, Kyra typically destroyed her paintings and really didn’t remember painting them). Nearly everyone in town went to her asking for predictions, advice, etc. At first, Kyra was overjoyed, thinking she was finally connecting to her people. But soon, she was consumed by the amount of art she had to produce and the demands put on her by everyone else. She did not enjoy painting. It even went as far as her parents not allowing her to adjust her medication or see her therapist because that stifled her creativity. That’s where things get weird.

Now I have never lived in a small Alaskan town before, but I just find this novel to be so unbelievable. Kyra dies because she is running away and someone from town literally blocks her access to an airplane and chases her to the frozen lake nearby. I just can’t picture everyone becoming so obsessed with a person (and a teenager at that), that they demand them to be locked up, creating, all the time. There’s the trope of mental illness being associated with magic and superpowers, which was an interesting but underdeveloped thought. But the people of the town were just too strange and culty.

The character development is really what kills this story. In flashbacks about Kyra, she keeps telling Corey that she is “more than just her illness;” which she also struggles with with the townspeople after Corey leaves, but we never learn anything about Kyra other than her illness. All the flashbacks are labeled as a hero day or in between bad days, or something as such. The main character is so bland and underdeveloped, this story would have been so much better if it was actually told from Kyra’s point of view. Then at least we would have gotten a more complete picture of everything that happened.

I think I dislike books the most when there’s potential and hints of good ideas but then they fizzle out. Kyra could have been an interesting character (there was no saving Corey), but we had to hear about her through the lens of an inarticulate potato. Challenging the ideas of mental health in small towns is relevant and could have even been explored through the ideas of mysticism and reverence, but this book went way off the deep end in that regard. This made the book more of a scary story about a crazy town, not about the way society views mental illness. If I could do it over, I’d skip this one.

Review by the Numbers:

Overall: 1/5

Writing: 1/5

Plot: 1/5

Character Development: 1/5

Message: 3/5

- Alaska (Reading My Way Around the World Challenge)

- A Book About LGBTQIA+ Experiences (My Diversity Challenge)

- Thriller (My Diversity Challenge)

- A Book With an Asexual Character (Celebrity Readers 2021 Diversity Challenge)

- A Book with Something Broken on the Cover (2021 PopSugar Reading Challenge)