Author: Holly Bourne
Blurb: Amelie loved Reese. And she thought he loved her. But she’s starting to realise love isn’t supposed to hurt like this. So now she’s retracing their story and untangling what happened by revisiting all the places he made her cry.
Because if she works out what went wrong, perhaps she can finally learn to get over him.
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This book is a wake-up call.
The Places I've Cried in Public is a greatly important story about gaslighting and emotional abuse within what appeared to be a 'healthy relationship' to our protagonist Amelie. Amelie falls head-over-heels in love with Reese when she relocates to a new area of England and attends a new college. Reese is Amelie's dream guy, he is handsome and a musician just like her and he is obsessed with her telling her she is perfect and he wants to take her out pretty much from the very first moment he meets her. The beginning of Amelie and Reese's relationship has all the tell-tale signs of a romantic 'meet cute' but it quickly turns sour and the reader begins to uncover (along with Amelie) the darker side of this obsession and the behavior that it leads to.
This is an incredibly dark story. There are trigger warnings at the beginning and end of the book for sexual assault and controlling behavior so please bear this in mind when picking up the book and reading any associated reviews including this one.
The narrative format of this novel was well-planned. Bourne uses tandem time frames following Amelie after her breakup with Reese as she visits all the places he made her cry in public as well as the past timeline in which Amelie first starts her new college and meets Reese for the first time and their subsequent relationship. Perhaps the most effective element of this narrative layout was the fact that Amelie would interject thoughts into the past timeline and highlighting examples of gaslighting and the controlling behavior that she overlooked in the moment but upon reflection, she realised that it was unhealthy.
I think Bourne did an excellent job with her handling of gaslighting and abusive relationships in this book; she presented a very healthy approach in how to handle and heal from an abusive relationship and she outlined where you can turn to find help such as therapy, your family and friends. She also takes the reader through Amelie's trauma as well as her healing and the whole narrative follows Amelie as she attempts to understand her trauma and discovers how to heal from it and how to move on. Thanks to the highlighting of gaslighting Bourne also helps the reader understand examples of controlling and abusive behavior within what could be perceived as a 'loving' relationship; this book could help a lot of people realise that if their partner is obsessively checking up on them or telling them what they can do or who they can see then maybe their relationship isn't as healthy as they think.
The book felt highly realistic to me. Amelie was a very believable protagonist and responded to this situation just as I would expect. She is a college-aged teenage girl falling in love for the first time, she pushes away her friends and believes everything this boy tells her, and accepts how he treats her as normal. As a reader, it is horrific to read. We know that Reese's behavior is wrong and so does present-day Amelie and she helps us see the flaws and the tell-tale signs of his obsessive control. I felt so much empathy for Amelie she perfectly represented how people being abused can be affected and sometimes seem to be in the wrong through the eyes of their friends and family but actually the person to blame is their abuser.
Reese, again, was a highly convincing antagonist. He was a textbook gaslighter and toxic partner. The most frustrating element of this book is that Reese did not repent for what he had done even when he took the abuse to a physical level- the law should have been involved after the incident in Sheffield but Amelie moved on from that and Reese never received the punishment he deserved and that made me angry but unfortunately reflects the reality for a lot of people.
This book blew me away and I think it is a vital and had-hitting book that every young girl should read.