About the Book
“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”
Review
I think the biggest change is how my age puts a distance on myself with Astrid which I didn't have as a teenager. There are things that happened in this book that, now that I'm older, I recognize as truly awful and horrible whereas I wasn't in the best of places myself when I was younger so I didn't understand the negatives.
When I was looking for books that focus on mental disability and this one popped up on a couple goodreads lists, I couldn't figure out why it would. Because much of this story is about Astrid going from home to home through the foster care system and how horrific it can be. But then I thought about Astrid's mother. Although she's not the main character, the story has a focus around her. It is because of Ingrid's Narcissistic personality disorder that Astrid is put in foster care in the first place. After reading it again though, I can see that Astrid shows many signs of PTSD through her anxiety and issues with emotional connections.
This story is incredibly dark and drew me in again, despite me knowing what was going to happen. And knowing how much I hated certain scenes, I just couldn't skip them. Because I wanted to experience it all again. I needed to feel all of the pain that Astrid goes through. But most of all, I knew it would all make the ending that much more perfect. And it was.