Published Dec. 12, 2017
When Livia Stone suddenly loses her twin brother, Jasper, she must learn to navigate her new life alone. As she faces tragedy and starts down a road toward
self-destruction, Daniel enters Livia’s life—at a moment when she needs it most.
Standing Sideways is a poignant, relevant, and touching story of survival, courage, and compassion that will have readers crying, laughing, and most of all, debating the issues affecting the lives of parents and teens alike on a journey of hope and forgiveness.- Goodreads
I sat on reviewing this book for a while. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it. For some specific reasons, it is hard for me to say that this was a good book as in the story or if this was simply a good representation of various forums of grief.
These are two different things for me. Because you can have a good story that wraps you into several layers of emotions, keep you waiting more and allows you to live in that world. A good representation of anything can provide key points, be obvious or not, to show you something and doesn’t necessarily have any other purpose other than to show you specific things.
I don’t feel that it was a good story. I feel that way because I wasn’t invested into the characters not even once. Livia is defined by her grief and there really isn’t anything beyond that. Therefore, I can’t really tell you what type of person she is or even the people around her. Their actions are based of her and yeah she does do somethings that are wrong but to me there was no substance. Therefore, I felt the story was lacking.
But, at the same time, I felt that it represented grief and strength on different levels in a really good way. You see how Livia handles her grief and how that grief affects her friendships and her family relationships. You see other people handle their own grief and hers as well.
What I liked about this book was how the author took care to show different ways of comfort, release, anger and different phrases of moving on. It was important to see that because you don’t really see a lot of teenagers expressing their grief in different ways out than anger and being reckless. Do not get me wrong Livia was not grieving in the most healthy way but her way gave attention to what other teens may be doing.
Overall, I am going to leave this as non rated because even after doing this review, I still don’t know how I feel about this read.
Motif by Tanya 