Where to begin with Places No One Knows? It’s about a girl who can’t sleep and the literal boy of her dreams. It’s about a boy who feels too much and all the ways he tries to dull it. It’s about pain and the different ways of coping with it. It’s about high school and heartache and heading committees. Through it all is this tiny thread of something else, because the girl who cannot sleep sees the boy who cannot stop feeling when she lights a candle and counts down from eleven. And in that in-between place, both feel realer than they ever do in actual life.
Brenna Yovanoff constructs a high school love story without using the cliche elements of the high school love story. She develops a world so real it feels like you just left it yesterday, or maybe only an hour ago. Her descriptions--not just of the two main characters, Marshall and Waverly, but of everyone--create unique individuals you can remember from your own group of friends or high school careers, or, at the very least, imagine sitting next to you, even if you’ve never met them. Brena Yovanoff’s Places No One Knows is perfection bound in a pink dust cover. It is a book you never want to be interrupted from, a story you finish and then flip over so you can immediately read it again. It’s haunting beauty will stand defiantly on your shelf of seemingly similar YA and pull your attention to it again and again. Cliche time--Places No One Knows is quite simply a must-read.