Long time no see. I am so sorry for being away for so loneg, but I had a huge reading slump and also uni was just crazy. It broke my heart that I wasn't feeling inspired to write anything in a long time, but I am determined to get back on track.
Going into this book I never thought it would affect me so much as it did if I am honest. Reading the synapses it didn't look like the story it actually was. But maybe it just me. This book caught me off guard and I don't remember relating to a character in a book this much before. But let's read the synapses and after that, I will tell you why I loved this book as much as I did.
The synapses:
Steffi has been a selective mute for most of her life - she's been silent for so long that she feels completely invisible. But Rhys, the new boy at school, sees her. He's deaf, and her knowledge of basic sign language means that she's assigned to look after him. To Rhys, it doesn't matter that Steffi doesn't talk, and as they find ways to communicate, Steffi finds that she does have a voice, and that she's falling in love with the one person who makes her feel brave enough to use it.
My Thoughts:
I know it might seem like a simple YA- contemporary romance, but for me, it was something else. The main character in this book is not actually selective mute at the time the story takes place, or at least not anymore, but she is still not really able to talk to people outside of her family and her best friend. She has social anxiety and that is something I am living with every day. In this book, I found so much understanding and honestly, the way Steffi thought was the way I usually think about things, whenever my anxiety hits me. So many quotes in this book speak to me, they were like something I would say or feel.
Rhys the male character is the cutest, but if you didn't already got the idea of how much I loved it, he wasn't really the main appealing thing in this book for me. Other than that I loved him so much. He was so supportive and didn't treat Steffi as there is something wrong with her at all. At the same time, I liked how he addressed his fears of losing Steffi because she is getting better. This is an experience I had myself with my friends actually and it's really true that if your world is opening up, there is a chance that for some time you'll forget the people who were there for you before or you just realise that your old friends weren't really the best people for you. And that's okay because people change and in my opinion, Rhys would've let Steffi go if it's about that. But I think they have formed a bond together, that Steffi would always know which people are important to her and she would always go back. Or not, but we'll never find out since this is a standalone.
The family in this book honestly had a smaller role as I would have expected it, but it was okay this way too. I liked how although Steffi's parents were divorced, they were able to support their daughter and still work together as a functioning family. I think it's something that is very rare in these days and it's so good to see this "good example" represented in a YA-story.
The only thing I cannot really put anywhere or don't know what to think of is the grief in this book. It was there, but it wasn't actually in my opinion. I cannot decide if I liked it that it was just barely there or if it's bothering me that I didn't get to find out more about Clark. He seemed like a very important person in Steffi's life and we never really hear anything about him, other than he was an amazing step-brother. We figure out that Clark and Steffi had a great relationship, but we never actually see why and why they are connected so much.
I hope you enjoyed reading this review and I also hope you're having an amazing day. If you're a uni student and your exams are coming up, I wish you good luck.
Until next time,
Bianka
