I’d always heard that when you truly love someone, you’re happy for them as long they’re happy. But that’s a lie. That’s higher-road bullshit. If y
I’d always heard that when you truly love someone, you’re happy for them as long they’re happy. But that’s a lie. That’s higher-road bullshit. If you love someone so much, why the hell would you be happy to see them with anyone else? I didn’t want the easy kind of love. I wanted the crazy love, the kind of love that created and destroyed all at the same time.
They say it takes a bitch to know one, and it will come as no surprise to many people that I found myself loving this book.
I love the lies. I love the manipulation. I love the bitterness. Or rather, I hated the main character. I hated her manipulation. I hated how she used people. I hated her doormat of a love interest.
But the thing is I loved hating them.
You are not meant to like these people. Make no mistake, Alice is a horrible, horrible person. What this book does so spectacularly is its ability to portray someone who feels real. Someone deeply flawed, someone so complex that you cannot help understanding them and sympathizing with them while hating them with every cell of your being. This book was so tremendously well-written.
Think about it. If you're going to die, and there are people in your life who deserve what's coming to them. Fuck, I know what I would do. I'm going to be a fucking bitch and do all the shit I could never have gotten away with otherwise before I die. It's called revenge, and it tastes as sweet as a plate of dark-chocolate covered orange peels, served to me by a half-clad Tom Hiddleston.
Whoo. Excuse me. Yum.
This book is not purely about revenge, it is about an immature girl, so caught up in a lie involving her family, that---in typical teenager style---she lataches onto that as an excuse to act out, to be a jerk. The cancer is merely the catalyst to her anger.
You're not going to like Alice.
The Summary: Some people feel that their life begins anew when they receive the news that they are recovering from terminal cancer.
Dr. Meredith took a deep breath. “Alice.” His brown eyes found mine, and it was only me and him. He exhaled. “You’re in remission.” Oh shit. This, I did not expect. This was not on my list.
While most people would rejoice at the prospect that they're going to LIVE, Alice is most unhappy about this. You see, she has lived the last year of her life knowing it was her last---including doing some rather unsavory things. It wasn't an entirely angelic year. There's no Make-A-Wish-Foundation final Disneyland trip with posed family pictures of Mickey Mouse shit here.
THEN:
You see, last year, there were some people who wronged Alice. And before she dies, she's going to make them pay.
Harvey is her best friend. They have literally lived their lives next to each other, their parents are best friends, and Harvey and Alice have grown up alongside each other. Harvey adores her. Every pair of best friend has a ringleader, and the leader of their little duo has always been Alice. He can see nothing, no one but her.
On that cold night in January it all slipped into place for me and she became my everything and my everyone. My music, my sun, my words, my hope, my logic, my confusion, my flaw. I was thirteen years old, and she was all these things to me. And I was her friend.
Alice treats Harvey like a dog, meaning she knows he'll always be there for her, she knows he will come when she shouts "Fetch!"
“Harvey,” I said, my voice low. “Trust me.” I knew what this looked like. It looked like I was using Harvey. But here was the reality of the situation: the minute my life went from semipermanent to most likely temporary, I decided to latch on to everything in my world that had always been permanent, and for me, Harvey was so permanent he was concrete.
Everyone has the sort of people who become a pebble in the shoe of life. Alice has several, namely Luke, the asshole ex-boyfriend---the one who revealed a secret, and Celeste, a lifelong nemesis and rival. Alice wants to get even, and get even, she does.
I can't say they don't deserve it. Luke is an asshole. He is homophobic, he is an abuser, he is a cheater. And he's about to get what's coming to him.
Luke hauled ass out of the locker room and ran for the ladder to the projector, which ran up the back of the bleachers opposite us. To Alice’s absolute delight, he wore nothing but a towel. Luke leaned forward a little farther and his towel began to slip. He wasn’t fast enough to catch it. We all watched as the white piece of fabric drifted slowly down to the bleachers below, leaving him in nothing but his skin.
Alice doesn't just use Harvey, she abuses him. She pushes him, using his love for her to enlist his help in executing her revenge.
I shook my head again and Alice took my hand, pulling me to her. “Please,” she whispered, so close to me that when she spoke, our lips touched. “Fine, but after this I’m done.”
NOW:
“What do you want, Celeste?” “All I want is for you to feel welcome. It’s cute how people are so excited to have you back.” She took two steps closer to me. “They don’t know what I know. The cancer might be gone, but the bitch isn’t.”
Now, Alice is going to live. And it completely sucks. She has to face up to all she's done at school. She has to face the hostile glares, the people she's alienated.
We stopped in front of the last case. Every surface was covered in cloth. Old, dying flowers had been thrown across the surface. There were candles; those idiots could have started a fire. And pictures of Alice. Her eyes had been crossed out and things like bitch or whore had been written across each print.
Now, she has to face what she had with Harvey. Their moments of tenderness, as he held her while she was dying. Harvey was fine for Alice when she had no future, but now that she's going to live, she can't bear to face him. Now, Alice plays with other boys, so she doesn't have to admit what she feels for Harvey.
Pushing away my memories of Harvey, I shoved Eric’s shoulder back and straddled his lap. This wasn’t scary or complicated like being with Harvey. This didn’t have to mean so much.
Now Alice has to face up to everything she's done. She has to confront her family. She has to come to terms with the fact that she has her whole life ahead of her.
Will Alice's future be one without her best friend?
I laid my head against him and he wound his arm around my shoulder. “What’s going to happen to us, Harvey?” He pressed his lips to my head and said, “It’s a surprise, I think.”
Alice: The characters in this book were so well-done, and I loved how Alice was written, while hating her. Alice is not a likeable character. She is selfish, she is a teenager. She blows things out of proportion. At the beginning of the book, Alice finds out that her mother is having an affair. That one single event becomes the stimulus for everything she does in the book. It becomes her drive for revenge. Teenagers can blow one single event out of proportion, and as frustrating as it is to the reader, that becomes her driving force. Cancer gave Alice a free pass to her anger.
Cancer would take away plenty. My hair, my body, my life. What I’d never realized, though, was that there was one privilege to dying: the right to live without consequence.
I hated her selfishness and her manipulation as I reveled in horror as I read about what she did. She uses her best friend, Harvey, as she sees fit.
After a moment, he threw his arms up and said, “God, what the hell, Al? This is so screwed up. You don’t talk to me for a year and now—no, this is ridiculous.”
I loved her anger, I loved her self-hate, because a person cannot act like this and not be utterly fucked up on the inside. Alice doesn't know how to be kind, it's like her mind thinks one thing, and she does another. She willfully sabotages every remote bit of kindness that comes to mind.
“I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to sound that way.” I almost said it, that I was sorry for how I’d acted and what I did, but instead I said, “Do you want to write up your own apology and I can sign it? Would that work better for you?”
Alice hates her mother's actions---what she sees as a desecration of love.
This feeling that the world was so pleased to call love destroyed people every day and it would do that to me too. It would disappoint and deceive and manipulate. But then, the part of me that was dying thought, What would it matter? If I wasn’t going to live long enough to have to worry about the aftermath of it all, what did it matter?
I loved it when Alice snaps. Like all good characters, there's a moment when everything comes to a climax, and boy, was it worth it to see Alice fall to pieces.
“You should’ve left us then. Ripped the Band-Aid off. Because the lies are destroying us,” I said, my voice catching on every syllable. “You ruined me. You made me this way. This.” I motioned to myself, my chest heaving now. “Is your fault. And now it’s too late to fix it.”
Harvey: Initially, he got on my nerves. He thinks the sun rises and sets on Alice. For most of the book, he puts up with Alice's bullshit without a fight. In his effort to get over Alice, it almost feels like he's using someone else, as he's pushing himself to like someone for the sake of liking someone. Harvey doesn't know how else he can move on, even as he realizes that he can never totally escape her.
I wanted to lie to her and tell her that I didn’t like Alice in that way, but I couldn’t. “I don’t know. But I’m not on a date with Alice. I’m here because I like you. That’s not a good answer, but I won’t lie to you.”
But as much as he is a doormat, Harvey isn't an ass. He's just a guy who's hopelessly entwined within Alice's web.
“Yeah.” I was an ass. I knew from the moment I asked Debora out that I wasn’t over Alice. I was too selfish to even bother wondering how this might end.
The Other Characters: I loved everyone else. All the side characters were brilliantly portrayed. There is a authentic dynamic between their relationships, and every single character feels human.
There are minor characters, like Debora, the really nice, smart girl who captures Harvey's attention---whom Alice instantly, irrationally hates. She is so fucking nice and my heart broke for her involvement in Harvey and Alice's twisted version of love. I loved the relationship between Alice and her mother, both with strong personalities. They are two negatives sides to a magnet: put them together, and they will repel each other.
Most mothers don’t talk to their daughters like that, but my mom and I had never been most mothers and daughters. I remembered reading about wolf packs when I was younger. Each wolf pack could only have one alpha, one chief. This was the very unfortunate truth of my mother and me. We were two alphas who could never coexist in peace. The only time we had was when she thought I was dying.
This was such a frustratingly amazing read. If you wanted adorable characters you could love, run far away. If you want devastatingly believable, hatefully flawed characters, you need this book....more
Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies
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