Book Review: The Places I’ve Cried In Public by Holly Bourne

First up, this book is so important. As I was warming up with the characters, getting used to the writing style, I saw that The Places I’ve Cried In Public is such an important read, especially for young girls since it deals with a topic a lot of other YA books don’t talk about.

Amelie tells the story about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend Reese who she met at school shortly after she and her parents moved to another part of England. The story is told from two different points in time, so she is basically telling the story of how she met Reese, fell in love and missed all the red flags until it was too late while reflecting on them, retracing and understanding what and why everything went wrong.

At first, I didn’t really warm up with Amelie. I didn’t like how hard she was on herself, how naive she sometimes behaved. Especially because Reese was so unlikable from the beginning on. He was very possessive, mean and just had an overall bad personality. I mean it’s obvious that the author wanted us to hate him but I just don’t understand how Amelie was able to like him in the beginning. I mean there must have been something about him that she saw but we, as readers, didn’t and I wish that the author would have made these character traits more visible, more understandable.

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.