The Quick Cut: A girl struggles to deal with the death of her twin sister as life continues on and she discovers what struggles her sibling was going through.
A Real Review:
Thank you to West 44 Books for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This is easily the quickest I have ever completed a book at less than an hour - novellas included. It is due to the fact that the book is written in the form of prose, so the pages go by very quickly (especially when you're a fast reader like I am). So if you're looking for a quick summer read with gorgeous imagery, this is the story for you.
Elena and Marianella are twin sisters who lived very different lives. While Marianella embraced their Puerto Rican culture, Elena continued to reject it and choose the life that did not follow the traditions of their family.
However, Elena's world gets rocked when her sister commits suicide not long after their fifteenth birthday and everything goes haywire. In a world where her sister is gone, Elena goes off the deep end and starts to live life on her terms - including drug use. This is when the truth comes out and Elena is forced to deal with the reality of her loss, the pain of her sister's death, and the depression that seems to be chasing the next sister down.
The words and the way they're put together paints a very specific picture that even someone like me can't ignore. I've never been one to like prose or poetry, but the way its written here is different and vibrant in the way that it paints a picture of the world these sisters lived in. The only problem is that as soon as you start to get into it, the whole book ends and you're going "that's it?!?!" Due to the style of the book, there is very little story given here and it is expanded out over a lot of pages to look much better. I would've much more preferred the book to have been expanded out more to be longer, tell us more about the extended family, and give far greater detail about Elena's time in therapy.
Although a beautiful portrayal of depression and the impact of suicide in a family, this short book ends right when you're hoping for more story to begin.
My rating: 4 out of 5