Willow by Julia Hoban

Ali Mark
Mar 17, 2016
6 min read

Gut Instinct Rating - 3

Story Line - 4

Writing Style - 5

Characters - 3

Excitement Factor -3

Believability for type and topics - 5

Similarity to other books - 3

Cover art - 4

Title Relevance - 5

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.95. I think it was more deserving of a 3.88.

Published in 2009.

Pages: 329.

Number of books by author: 10.

Genre: YA Fiction.

After Willow accidentally kills her parents in a car accident, she switches schools and moves in with her older brother, his wife, and their daughter. Willow simply wants to get through each day, using self-harm to manage. But when Guy figures out she cuts, he invests in Willow's well being quite strongly. Will their relationship be based on guilt, or affection?

You may like this book if you like the following sub-genres:

Self-Harm Stories
Coming of Age
Relationships

This book could've been really powerful, but it just lacked everything I want out of a story like this. It's no secret that self-harm books are existing, and in quite a good quantity. However, other than the reason for self-harming in this book, it was pretty much like every other self-harm book (which can be fine here & there, but when the entire book's purpose is about self-harm, there's not much more to gather). Girl is depressed. Girl takes it out on herself. Girl meets boy. Boy tries to solve all the girls' problems. For me, this isn't a book that moved me, it didn't make me feel anything, I just wanted to finish and see what the ending was, which was pretty boring.

My gut instinct was to give this 3 stars, and if you take out the believability and writing style and just focus on the story itself, this book would've only received a 3.25, which is much closer to my initial rating. The 3.88 was heavily brought up by writing style, believability, and the art (both in title and the cover art). Which is fine, but I want to give you a realistic expectation for this book, not the over-inflated rating from goodreads (which I'm still in shock by... 3.95/5!)

The characters in this book, if we really focus on just the primary - Willow, she's your typical angsty girl who's managed to all of a sudden develop social anxiety and some behavioral quirks. (Now, I'm not saying 7 months after losing both of my parents in a car wreck in which I was driving is not going to lead to some problems, but 7 months is a long time to have these problems in such an extreme display.) Which would be fine, but the book starts off with Willow seeing a red line down some girl's arm, and she discusses how the girl doesn't look the type. There's no type. A cutter is a cutter. So, I dislike the way the author automatically sets up a stereotype for self-harm via Willow, a self-harmer. I know that may sound like a harsh analysis, but it's really a poor choice when you're starting a book that the only subject matter is self-harm. Anyways, outside of that, Willow seems to illicit all the same issues other teenagers due, but everything in her life is an extreme. She's punishing herself for her parents' death... but can we stop for a moment here and evaluate WHY the family didn't go to grief counseling? Two children lost both parents. And the author doesn't think it's a good idea to go to grief counseling? So, another poor choice by the author (and maybe this is less about character development and more about the story line, but I think involving a character who focuses on grief counseling is probably a huge (missing) component to this story).

So, enough about Willow being over dramatized and under-evaluated. The guy who figures out her story, named Guy (which is simply a pet-peeve... of all the names in the world, who names their male child Guy...?), is quite possibly more unstable than Willow. He immediately uses his connection with a college professor (and this kid is like, a junior, which is fine.... but college prep classes, or taking college courses in high school - it's not usually an option to take a specific course on anthropology.... maybe that's just where I live, but for me, this is an issue with character development) to his advantage since David, his professor, is Willow's older brother - yes, the same one she lives with. And then Willow plays the he's a victim, too, card. But for the better part of this novel, Guy constantly degrades Willow's action to self-harm (now, I'm not condoning it, but the author can't imagine (or maybe she did and this was her point, but it would've been a horrible choice) how incredibly harmful this type of language is. Someone reading this who's trying to stop harming themselves, this book might drive their urges because it's another situation where society looks down on individuals who self-harm. Anyways, Guy is back-and-forth. He wants to be friends with Willow, he doesn't want to be friends with her because he's got better things to do than babysit a cutter, etc., etc. From the beginning, I didn't like her, and then when he was introduced I was really just annoyed. I didn't find there to be much character growth except for at the very end, there was a teeny-tiny bit of growth from David and an even smaller amount of growth from Willow. I just hated everything the author did with these characters. They were just so inconsistent, which is fine in a hormonal teenager, but it was just all over the place and I felt like I should've been reading a book about a mood disorder, because you just never knew which version of these two characters you were going to get. I also really hated the fact that everyone in the book was friends with everyone else, which meant that there were 3 females, 3 males, and they were all dating or in some kind of romantic situation with one another. Which, maybe in some high school's is normal, but I'm doubting everyone's screwing everyone else's best friends. It was just strange. So, aside from my hatred of the characters in this book, it was just a fine book.

The writing style was fine - very basic, very YA. There wasn't anything in there that was challenging to read or that was difficult to comprehend. The transitions were all fine and dandy, the chapters were long, but confined to a day or a moment. (It was hard to tell how time flowed, so I'm just assuming that this was over a longer span of time, and that the time wouldn't influence the believability of this book). I already mentioned the similarities to every other self-harm book in the world. There wasn't anything particularly special about this one, and the ending wasn't really empowering for self-harmers trying to quit, which I imagine is kind of what the purpose was... to give someone hope that they can quit. It was a mostly boring book; other than all the character drama, there wasn't really anything too exciting or too dull. It simply existed.

The title was fine - I can't think of a better title, so I guess that means it was fitting. The cover art was kind of strange. There's a quote on the cover that talks about hiding a secret that is seen... which implies that it's seen to everyone. Now, the synopsis on the back of the book doesn't imply that at all, but the quote may not have been a great choice. I would've rather not had that quote held over my head, because for me, it made me focus on the idea that someone else would find out... but the whole time, Guy is the only one who found out what was happening. So I thought it was a bit misleading. I didn't dock it down much, but the quote was bothersome to me.

I'm still debating whether or not this book deserves a space on my shelf. I tend to have a rule that it requires 3-stars to advance to a spot on the shelf, so it may sit there until the end of the month when I make a more definite decision. For now, it's earned its spot, but I'm not really sure why...