Gray

I don't normally write reviews for books. Rather than splash my critiques onto the internet, I keep my thoughts to myself, holding them close, keeping them personal. After all, reviews are just opinions, subjective words waiting to be disagreed with and argued. However, in the case of Gray by Pete Wentz, I am making a rare exception.

Gray is moving, deep, poignant and depressing. It's beautiful and engrossing. It will break your heart wide open, force you to stare into its dark void, sew up the wound again and push you further down the path.

It's like a 240 page Fall Out Boy song--catchy and thought-provoking. I want to highlight paragraphs, write down sentences so that I can look back at them later and revisit the emotion. I want to crawl inside it's darkness and listen to the silence. I want to hug him, offer him what he's searching for, hold out my hands to him and reassure him that everything is going to be okay (even if I'm not entirely sure myself that it will).

I found myself wanting to read pages out loud to my husband so that he could share in the profoundness with me but reading it alone just seemed to match the isolation written on the pages.

This book makes me want to delve into my own characters even more and expose their flaws and eccentricities for all the world to read, not caring what the critics say and pick apart. Now, more than ever, I want to embrace life, revel in its unexpected beauty, endure its pain, laugh when it throws me for a loop, prove everything (and everyone) wrong. I want to notice every little detail. The sounds, the light, the smells. Everything.

Any book that can bring forth such emotion deserves recognition. Gray is that book and I look forward to rereading it whenever I need to be reminded.

This review can also be found on Goodreads.