Today is my stop on The Words We Keep Book tour! Thanks TBR and Beyond Tours for letting me be a part of this tour. If you are looking for a story with a raw but relatable representation of mental illness then I think you would enjoy this book. For my stop on The Words We Keep Book Tour, I’m doing a review along with a list of my favorite quotes from the book. Hope you enjoy!
Trigger Warnings: Anxiety, Depression, Self Harm, Suicidal ideation
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A beautifully realistic, relatable story about mental health and the healing powers of art–perfect for fans of Girl in Pieces and How it Feels to Float.It’s been three months since The Night on the Bathroom Floor–when Lily found her older sister Alice hurting herself. Ever since then, Lily has been desperately trying to keep things together, for herself and for her family. But now Alice is coming home from her treatment program and it is becoming harder for Lily to ignore all of the feelings she’s been trying to outrun.Enter Micah, a new student at school with a past of his own. He was in treatment with Alice and seems determined to get Lily to process not only Alice’s experience, but her own. Because Lily has secrets, too. Compulsions she can’t seem to let go of and thoughts she can’t drown out.When Lily and Micah embark on an art project for school involving finding poetry in unexpected places, she realizes that it’s the words she’s been swallowing that desperately want to break through
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The Words We Keep has a raw but relatable story about mental illness and how the stigma society has surrounding mental health issues affects people that are struggling and keeps so many people from getting help. What made me want to read this book was the mental illness representation. I heard that fans of All The Bright Places would probably like this book, so I thought I would like this story. And The Words We Keep exceeded my expectations by having one of the most relatable portrayals of depression I’ve ever read!
The Words We Keep Plot
This YA Contemporary novel’s about Lily, a high school junior thats struggling to keep things together ever since the night she found Alice, her older sister, hurting herself three months ago. With her sister getting a bipolar diagnosis and away at a treatment program, It’s easier for her to avoid thinking about that night and pretend like everything is normal. But Lily has a hard time processing everything with her sister and starts questioning her own mental health.
Things change when she learns that Alice is returning home and gets assigned a student, Micah, as a partner for an english project who’s been to the same treatment program and knows Alice. These reminders puts all the scary thoughts and feelings she’s been trying to avoid in the forefront. Stewart was able to beautifully capture Lily’s mental health slowly declining as the story progressed in an authentic and moving way, one that would resonate well with anyone who has gone through something similar.
At times it got very real! To be honest, I got kinda triggered and had some secondhand anxiety which surprised me. I don’t often get triggered by these topics because of how important I think it’s to discuss mental health issues openly, but this just shows how realistic the anxiety and depression representation was in this book. The Words We Keep depicted some very raw and dark aspects of mental illness that may be hard to read at times but are very important.
The Words We Keep Characters
People seeing stories with characters with mental health issues that are accurate instead of being overly romanticized or portrayed as a harmful stereotype has been very important to me. The mental health struggles that the characters experienced were written in a very realistic way and showed aspects of their struggles that I found very relatable.
Lily
With the story being told from Lily’s perspective, I felt like I really got to know her. Lily had the pressure to always be the “perfect daughter” in the family which causes her to be an uptight overachiever and perfectionist. This pressure on her to do the best at everything and keep herself together gets even harder after everything with her sister. Lily’s inner thoughts felt very intimate, with her internal thoughts and feelings versus the anxious thoughts that are making feel like she’s going crazy.
Though I don’t relate to her anxiety over looking perfect, I do relate heavily to the voice in her head that kept telling her that she wasn’t good enough. I have Depression and Inattentive ADHD and not feeling good enough is a feeling I’ve struggled with all my life. So seeing Lily struggle with that too was very relatable and made me emotional at times. This book did a good job at showing how toxic perfectionism could affect a person and make it harder for them to ask for help.
Micah
The character I loved and found the most relatable was defiantly Micah! He was a good foil to Lily’s character by being someone who didn’t care about looking perfect and embraced his weirdness. His character’s struggle with depression was the most relatable thing I’ve read because he wasn’t a stereotypical emo looking dude, didn’t “look depressed” in a way society envisions depressed people. He felt so real, his depression wasn’t his entire personality. He was an artsy funny guy who wore weird socks and passionately talked about wanting to draw outside the lines of coloring books! I loved his character a lot and there were so many things he said or did that made me think “Dude, same!”
For their school art project, Lily and Micah become the Anonymous Guerrilla Poets of Ridgemont High. I loved the idea of giving other students an outlet to anonymously express themselves and be heard, showing how art can help so many people who want a sense of connection and to feel less alone. Along with the school project, I loved the cute romance between Lily and Micah. There were moments that Micah had me swooning and others that made me super emotional because they spoke to me deeply. I just love Micah and I’m relieved that this book didn’t have their love for each other “fix” them.
The Words We Keep Writing Style
I think the format of The Words We Keep, Lily’s narration with poetry mixed in, was an aspect that made this story so captivating. The way Stewart wrote Lily’s inner thoughts felt very intimate, with her internal thoughts and feelings versus the anxious ones being in italics. I liked that there was crossed out lines of dialogue used to show what Lily wanted to say but didn’t. And I loved the parts that were in play script format. It was a smart way to show that out-of-body feeling Lily was experiencing due to anxiety induced depersonalization.
The only critique I have for The Words We Keep, and what kept this book from getting 5 stars, was the pacing. The pacing was slow at first but once I was over a quarter the way through the pacing speed up and I was more invested in the story.
Conclusion
There are so many more things I could talk at length about including Lily’s relationship with Alice and the rest of her family. But this post would be too long. Overall, The Words We Keep was emotional and realistic but still hopeful instead of tragic. Anyone with anxiety and/or depression will most likely find this book realistically relatable. I found The Words We Keep very touching and this book now has a special place in my heart.
Favorite Quotes
1. “But there is no lightning bolt of insanity. It’s more like a drizzling leak you don’t even notice until you’re gasping for air, suddenly and irrevocably aware that you’ve drowned in your own thoughts.”
2. “My biggest fear is that no matter what I do, all people will ever see is the boy who almost jumped. The boy from rehab. And maybe that’s all I’ll see, too. So I come here to remember that I’m alive. That I’m more than Manic Micah. I have a choice.” He turns his hand palm up, and without thinking I reach out and outline the semicolon tattoo on his wrist with the tip of my finger. “This doesn’t mean I almost died. It means I chose to stay.”
3. “It’s just, I have this vision, you know? A world where your diagnosis doesn’t define you, and getting help doesn’t make you weak or dangerous or other. And sometimes I forget that the world isn’t there yet.”
4. “People always ask, Why are you depressed? But the boring truth is that nothing is wrong. I feel nothing. I am nothing. When I look into the future, nothing. It’s the nothing that destroys me. People always talk about mental illness like it’s a heroic war with a monstrous disease. But the fact is, we’re fighting ourselves. Just a bunch of smaller battles. Getting up, every day, facing down the beasts because I can never beat them. Because they are me. The best I can do is-“
“Make friends with the monsters,”
5. “You know that voice in your head–the one that tells you to apologize for existing? That says you’re not enough?”
I nod.
“It’s lying.” He leans in closer to me, his breath warm on my face. “You are enough. Right now. Just the way you are.”
6. Unspoken Haiku
Just behind my ribs
deep by my heart, lies a trove
of words unspoken.
I hide my scars, too,
because no one wants to see
the truth that is me.
Will they want to stay
if they see the wounds and hear
all the words I keep?
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Erin Stewart is the author of SCARS LIKE WINGS, her debut novel. Erin is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern and a BYU undergraduate who works as a freelance writer and editor, as well as a weekly columnist in Salt Lake City.
Erin lives in Utah with her husband and three children. She is represented by the amazing Rebecca Sherman of Writers House.
Check out Stewart’s Author Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
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