History Is All You Left Me

By: Adam Silvera

Narrated by: Tom Picasso

OCD-afflicted Griffin has just lost his first love, Theo, in a drowning accident. In an attempt to hold on to every piece of the past, he forges a friendship with Theo's last boyfriend, Jackson. When Jackson begins to exhibit signs of guilt, Griffin suspects he's hiding something and will stop at nothing to get to the truth about Theo's death. But as the grieving pair grows closer, listeners will question Griffin's own version of the truth - in terms of both what he's willing to hide and what true love means.

©2017 Adam Silvera (P)2017 Recorded Books

love the story, not the narrator

another amazing book from adam silvera. cannot gush enough. however, i found it difficult to get through because of the narrator. he speaks with a lot of inflection and emotion, but can, at times, sound like an overexcited child.

Sad

I just would like to warn that this is a depressing read/listen. It’s good if you need a good cry or need to go through a bit of grief on your own.

Real grief

This Adam Silvera book just reinforces how he has an odd flair for writing stories about sad boys. I don't mean that as an insult, but you can't deny how it's a common thread among a lot of his writing.

The thing is, he REALLY does it well. I can't help but feel that he draws a lot from personal experience in terms of how he breathes life into his characters because the emotional weight of what they go through is quite palpable. It's not different with this book that has death and loss so central so the story. But they're not just one-dimensionally sad - anyone who has had to deal with the grief from the death of a loved one will feel some degree of resonance with our protagonist after Theo's death.

The way the story unfolds takes a fair amount of time as we're stuck with a first-person POV and naturally a potentially unreliable narrator in the form of our protagonist. Grief is difficult and we're more than capable of lying even to ourselves within the safety of our own heads, so being privy to his direct thoughts is no guarantee of the truth. And that's sort of the brilliance of this story.

Great book. Great choice for audiobook narration. Not Silvera's best, but you see how things evolve based on where he started from here.

Heart tugging

So good I had tears the whole book and was just blown away by the story telling

Not bad, not my favorite

I had a little bit of a hard time getting hooked as the book started. The narrator’s voice is soothing enough that he should do guided meditations, not books, because at times I didn’t even catch what was actually being said, just that his voice was hypnotic. After Grif decides to incorporate Jackson into his life (no spoiler there, it’s in the author’s description) it got more interesting to me. I finished it on my drive from Maine to NJ today. There were a few things I did not see coming.