Alice Hoffman is a well-established author with several critically acclaimed books and quite a few successful movies to her name.Her Book ‘Faithful’ was published in 2016 and has since garnered more than 18,000 ratings on Goodreads. Is it easy to write yet another angsty teen novel about redemption? YES.Is it easy to make it good? Not really. Several have tried and failed, adding to the already long list of crappy YA angsty novels. Alice Hoffman is, fortunately, a welcome change.

This is the story of a girl has survivor’s guilt who thinks she is beyond redemption but keeps looking for it subconsciously and at the end realizes that the best redemption for the past is leading a generous, kind life in the present.

The book starts off with a few flashbacks and a lot of self-hate inflicted by the protagonist on herself. For the first few chapters, you sympathize with Shelby Richmond who has to deal with way more issues than a teen girl could cope with. However, it soon gets old. Her self-hatred causing her mistreatment of people around her in combination with self-destructive behavior becomes extremely repetitive and stale. It changes, however when she starts showing humane emotions of kindness; first towards animals[a bunch of street dogs] and later towards her co-worker and her twins.

You cant help but sympathize with Ben, to whom she is constantly being a jerk to, even though her rapport with her pet shop co-worker shows that she is not, in fact, incapable of having meaningful relationships.Her constant memories of her comatose friend which Shelby keeps thinking of in a good light just show how bad she is at judging people. The comatose friend, while clearly in an unfortunate situation, was not a good person by any standards, which anyone with reason can see.

The interesting parts of the book are Shelby’s relationship with her parents and the twins. Her mother’s battle with cancer and the effect on her death on Shelby and much more sadly, Buddy the dog, makes for a tear-jerking reading experience and is the best part of the book. The father is a typical jackass who in an even more typical “twist” is not so much of an ass like all crappy literary dads.

James, the tattoo artist is actually the savior/guardian angel who is in love with Shelby from a distance and the reveal is supposed to be a surprise but in reality is quite predictable. Predictable, but fun to read nonetheless, thanks to Hoffman’s magic with the pen.

Selected Quotes

• “She doesn’t have a mother anymore. There’s no one to whom she’s the most important person in the world.”
• “Here you are,” Shelby tells Buddy. “So now you know, she’s not coming back. Not if you wait for a hundred years. She’s left you and you’re all alone, so get used to it.”
• “Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. “

Goodreads Rating – 4.01                                                         WW rating – 3.75