This has been on my TBR ever since it came out. I was looking forward to reading Before I Let Go, because I enjoyed reading Nijkamp’s other book: This is Where it Ends (which is about a school shooting). After reading the blurb of BILG, it sounded very cliché, but sometimes clichés can be a good thing! So I opened my Kindle app, and started reading…

Best friends Corey and Kyra were inseparable in their snow-covered town of Lost Creek, Alaska. When Corey moves away, she makes Kyra promise to stay strong during the long, dark winter, and wait for her return.

Just days before Corey is to return home to visit, Kyra dies. Corey is devastated―and confused. The entire Lost community speaks in hushed tones about the town’s lost daughter, saying her death was meant to be. And they push Corey away like she’s a stranger.

Corey knows something is wrong. With every hour, her suspicion grows. Lost is keeping secrets―chilling secrets. But piecing together the truth about what happened to her best friend may prove as difficult as lighting the sky in an Alaskan winter…

BILG started off at quite a slow pace… There were a lot of parts of the beginning that seemed quite repetitive and I was praying that the rest of the book wouldn’t be the same. However, I did see that the book was quite short, so I also knew that the book would be a quick read and I hoped that Nijkamp packed a lot of mystery into such a short time.

It’s a mashup of two clichés: the dead best friend who had loads of secrets and also may have been in love with the other friend who is alive because… well… BURY YOUR GAYS! And also the cliché of a girl moving to a small town that has loads of secrets. Seriously though, the people in the town are SO CREEPY AND WEIRD and they just sound like a cult. I was half expecting them to come out with pitchforks and flaming torches chanting some weird prayer thing. I guess this comes from them being brainwashed by Kyra’s death. But it did get to a point where I just kept getting angry at them because there was Corey, trying to find out what happened to her friend, and then there are the townspeople just being complete and utter d****.

“But I want my life to have meaning because I give it meaning, not because someone else says that it does. I want my life to mean something because I create. Because I love. Because I make the world a better place.”

― Marieke Nijkamp, Before I Let Go

Regarding the characters, I didn’t love Corey. She was fairly bland and lacked character development. Despite going through some immense realizations when visiting her hometown, I don’t think that she changed all that much… She was very…. I don’t know what the word is… Boring, I guess? She was very two-dimensional and I didn’t connect with her at all. Though I can’t speak for the representation, I felt the author took great care in representing Kyra’s bipolar disorder. Kyra remains an individual and unique person while dealing with her illness and I feel much information about the reality of this disorder is revealed through the text which I love to see in literature.

Additionally, I LOVED how this book examines the trope/misconception that mental illness is something that is “magical” and that greater depth and power comes from the manifestation of said illnesses. Although I can’t say whether the representation was positive or not (I do not have BPD), I do realise that Nijkamp highlighted a lot of key areas of the illness.

I am a bit conflicted on how the LGBTQ+ representation is conveyed in the book and I’ve noticed that it hasn’t really been received that well by other members of the book community. Again, I can’t speak about the rep here, but a lot of people (including myself) have labelled this book as a novel that falls into the “burying your gays” trope. This is seen where Kyra – who is pansexual – is dead. But then on the other hand, we have the main character – Corey – who is asexual. On top of this, I also felt that there was not much development into the character’s sexualities beyond finding the labels they identify with (which is definitely important to include!) and one having unreciprocated feelings for the other. It felt like Nijkamp just threw the labels into the book and just left them there without any development. To be honest, I actually haven’t found any own voices reviews about this novel and the pansexual and asexual representation, so if someone has read this book and is pan or asexual, then I would love to hear what you thought!

Overall, this book wasn’t that great. Sure, there were some compelling elements such as the mystery (sometimes), and I did like a few of the characters, but for me. there were just to parts of the story that I was questioning and things that just didn’t fit right. Hence the 3 star rating. I probably will end up reading Nijkamp’s next book, but I don’t have my hopes up for anything absolutely amazing as my opinion on her two previous books have been average.

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review