Hold Still is a simultaneous punch in the gut and pat on the back to anyone who’s ever been impacted by suicide. This book made me choke up and cry more than anything else I’ve ever read. Nina LaCour, the queen of grief stories, has created a pseudo-memoir for anyone still struggling, showing us all we’re not alone in our loss.
In words and illustrations, Ingrid left behind a painful farewell in her journal for Caitlin. Now Caitlin is left alone, by loss and by choice, struggling to find renewed hope in the wake of her best friend's suicide. With the help of family and newfound friends, Caitlin will encounter first love, broaden her horizons, and start to realize that true friendship didn't die with Ingrid. And the journal which once seemed only to chronicle Ingrid's descent into depression, becomes the tool by which Caitlin once again reaches out to all those who loved Ingrid—and Caitlin herself.
This is the second Nina LaCour book I’ve read, and while I didn’t really enjoy We Are Okay, Hold Still came at me like a bat to the head. I knew coming into this story that it was going to hurt, having lost someone I know to suicide in the past year, but I never expected just how seen I would feel by LaCour’s writing. The focus on anger, frustration, and the absolute guilt Nina experiences tore through me, but it was seeing her work through this and accept the situation for what it was that really made me cry.
The book starts off primarily with fragmentation, something I rarely see in long-form works but loved all the same. LaCour’s start-and-stop snippets of Caitlin’s very fresh grief hit me like a ton of bricks and set the tone for the rest of the book perfectly. What came next, a series of slow introductions of various characters who were all impacted in some way by Ingrid’s loss, just makes the entire bool. Exploring the impact Ingrid Jayson, Ms. Delani, Caitlin’s parents, and her family was painful and powerful. I especially was drawn to the emphasis on Jayson, whose brief not-relationship with Ingrid put him in an interesting spot when coming to terms with what he deems the “appropriate” level of grief.
There’s no beauty in the mental illness in Hold Still, no glamorization of suicide and self-harm. The focus keeps itself on Caitlin, dealing with her own depressive episodes in response to losing Ingrid. The metaphors of the journal, the cinema, and the treehouse—which I read as two metaphors of the past and one of the future, respectively—truly carried the more healing aspects of the story. Watching Caitlin cope through creation and building, and through letting go of the journal and accepting the destruction of the cinema, were particularly haunting moments for me. I genuinely found little flaws with this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants a deeper, angsty story with an optimistic ending.
Nina LaCour is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning and nationally bestselling author of six young adult novels, including Watch Over Me and We Are Okay; the children's book Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle; and Yerba Buena, a novel for adults. She's on faculty at Hamline University's MFA in writing for Children and Young Adults program, and teaches an online class of her own called The Slow Novel Lab. A former indie bookseller and high school English teacher, she lives with her family in San Francisco.
You can find more on LaCour at her website, https://www.ninalacour.com/. Her newest book, Yerba Buena, is out now.
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