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The Beauty That Remains by Ashley Woodfolk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I haven’t had a book that truly blew me away this much since the beginning of this year, and I haven’t been promoting a 2018 release as hard as this one. It’s impossible to describe the well of deep love that runs through me for this book. We follow three grief stricken teens, which just tore a raw wound into my heart to see them in such deep pain trying to cope with their big loss of the death of a close one.

We have Shay, who runs an indie music blog and was an ex-band manager, and recently lost her twin sister to leukemia. There’s Autumn, an adopted Korean bookworm, who just lost her life-long best friend to a tragic car accident. Then there’s Logan, a gay guy who played bass and was a lead singer, whose ex-boyfriend had an overdose. The one thing that brings these lost souls together is the power of music.

The plot itself is slow moving, there’s not really much that’s happening. It’s more a character based journey through life, which was the perfect thing that I needed at that moment (also the reason that I;m in a huge book hangover.) If you appreciate a raw and authentically real writing style, run don’t walk to the bookstore the day it’s released.

I’ve been saying this for the past couple of years, but we are in sore need of more realistic and diverse teen characters like the ones we have here. Woodfolk has a way with words, is a natural storyteller, because her writing seems to flow effortlessly and she absolutely nailed it with the three different POVs. So much can go wrong with multiple narrator, it’s a risky move to make and rarely well done in my experience, but I can praise Woodfolk for perfection with this, to the moon and back always. (Which is the highest praise from a moonchild like me.)

What I could really appreciate is that there wasn’t a tragic moment/accident that happened on page; this book didn’t focus on the thing itself. It shows the after-math of this life-changing tragedy among those people who are the closest.

My favorite scenes balanced the delicate line of grief-stricken pain and loving nostalgic memories. Some the scenes had nothing to do with that, it was just a bunch of teens going to a concert of their favorite band, or a new romantic relationship blooming, or the support of the closest best friends. I kept on imagining these characters as real people in my city, because I cared and truly deeply connected to every one of them. And that my friends, is the highest praise that I can give for a book. 10,000/10 stars

**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own**


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