This book taught me in many ways the beauty of whims and spontaneity. I read this book on a whim – I had no real comprehension of what the story was about; I picked it up at a local book store because the cover was bright and beautiful.
Sometimes, there doesn’t need to be a reason to do something random. The adventure of Ultra-Violet re-Markey-able and Theodore Finch may have been a plan established by a higher power, but there’s a strong likelihood that their love story was utterly coincidental. Jennifer Niven communicates through this spontaneous and heart-wrenching novel that not all coincidences are fickle and flimsy.
The characterisation of Violet and Finch is easy to follow and easy to cry about; we meet both characters at a paramount precipice (literally); this represents that they are two separate characters who live separate lives that happen to want to be a part of the other’s.
This is a concept I find is often lost in YA books; two people meet and instantly, their lives become one and they have no personal development, only relationship development. Violet and Finch are beautiful characters in the sense that they both have their own issues that the other cannot possible fathom; their relationship resembles a real life relationship and I admire Niven’s incorporation of the whimsical and the real.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as touched and ‘screaming-instructions-for-the-characters-to-follow-so-they-don’t-mess-it-all-up’ as I was while reading this book. There is something so… beautiful in the love between Violet and Finch – I can’t even count the level of feels I had for these two while reading. I can honestly say I related to Finch more than with Violet; but both characters, being so different and unique, are easily relatable. I found Violet and Finch easier to barack for, both as characters and as a relationship, because there’s something so pleasant in the gestures of sacrifice they made for each other – they epitomised the exaltation of falling in love for the first time. The way they dedicated themselves to each other and the desire for adventure seems irrational to a person who isn’t in love or hasn’t felt anything of its equivalent – but to those who have, you understand the frenzy both characters feel throughout the novel.
Although I picked this book up on a whim (just like how Finch and Violet met), the profound message of seizing a moment and making the most of this world and the people in it is communicated to me and the characters in this novel. Serendipity, whether in the form of book buying or meeting a person one is not likely to forget anytime soon, is one of the world’s greatest gift.
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Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop.
