The Places I've Cried in Public

TW: emotional abuse, gaslighting This broke me into pieces. This book hit closer to home than I would like to admit. I couldn’t stop myself from shedding a few tears. It follows the story of Amelie and Reese. Amelie is new in town and falls head over hills for Reese. She starts to think she is in a fairy tale kind of relationship. Soon Reese's true color begins to show, yet so subtly it can't be figured easily. After a messy break-up, Amelie starts to think what went wrong, and begins a memory-mapping, tracing over every place she cried, trying to sort out how her life came down to this, how she became this friendless, hopeless, dreamless crying girl. When it comes to emotional abuse, it's freaking hard to understand what's going wrong. The terrible confusion, anxiety and worthlessness can affect someone in a way which is very difficult to get if you yourself haven’t experienced it. "Trauma is trauma. Your brain and body don't differentiate between physical and emotional abuse. They only respond to attack. Attack that you didn't deserve." I am really glad the author chose to emphasize on emotional abuse. Lots of people undergo similar situation. But some of them can't come out of it, because they don't get enough space to think through everything that's happened to them, they don't get people beside them who truly cares. It's an excellent, hard-hitting, brutally honest novel. I am really loving Holly Bourne for discussing such difficult topics in her novels. I really wish I could read it when I was younger.