listenTitle: Listen
Author: Nancy Coffelt
Genre: Young Adult
Publisher: WestSide Books
Source: Review Copy Provided by Author
Parental Warning: child abuse, mental illness, criminal activity

Summary:
Carrie, Kurt, and Will each carry with them a uniquely tragic history.  All victims of either physical and mental abuse or mental illness the threesome find themselves tangled in each other’s lives in ways that showcase the struggle to accept and rebuild.

Kurt is a surly young man victimized by his mother’s abusive boyfriend while she did little to help and protect him.  He is intelligent and longs for acceptance and love, primarily from his long lost father.  Hopeful to be reunited with one and the same he takes on a job rescuing abused animals.  Or so he thinks.

Employing Kurt is Carrie, a middle aged woman who lives with a bevy of strange animals.  She’s suffering from a serious mental illness that has her hearing these same animals speak.  As an extension of that ability she pays Kurt to save more animals she perceives to be abused and bring them to live in her dilapidated house. Unfortunately she takes this mission to save the unfortunate a bit too far when it starts to creep it’s way into the human realm.

Will has been on his own since the death of his mother and the incarceration of his addict prone brother.  Though he is tied to Kurt via his job as a school tutor he’s most focused on trying to forge a relationship with Claire.  Soft spoken and timid by nature he is happy when that romantic entanglement begins to form.  Trying to be all things to all people his relationship with her is destroyed when he is the one to discover that Kurt has gotten more than he bargained for in his job with Carrie.

As their three lives continue to weave together revelations and discoveries are made that change not only their lives but the lives of friends, family and the community around them.

Opinion:
I’m going to start off saying that I really wanted to find something positive to say about this book but honestly I can’t.  What didn’t I like about this story?  Though I’ve never been a fan of child abuse and/or mental illness stories it wasn’t the fact that Listen was darker than the average young adult novel I’ve read.  It was the fact that there was so much going on that it actually felt manic.  There was the aforementioned child abuse and mental illness but I’ll also add in animal abuse, abandonment, drug & alcohol abuse and multiple instances of criminal activity for good measure.  I mean I know that generally speaking, in real life, most times all of the above go hand in hand but man oh man it was a lot to read in a short book of just over two hundred pages.

Now maybe that was the point, maybe the reader was supposed to feel that nervous high strung feeling the characters were but really I didn’t like it.  I would have much rather have seen an in depth story about one of the characters compared to skimming the surface of three. Again, it was just way too much.

At times, I struggled with the need for Will in this story.  The relationship between Carrie and Kurt made sense, but Will, he was clearly there more for progression of their story than anything else.  Making him a victim of abuse didn’t add to the story at all in fact it just made it one more thing on top of all the rest.  In fact, I honestly found myself confusing Kurt and Will’s stories at times because they were so similar.

As it relates to the above, I believe part of the reason I struggled with confusion of these two characters is that for a good portion of the book all three stories were jumping back and forth. We’d get several pages of Will then several of Kurt then Carrie.  It was very disjointed and many times the transitions were so abrupt I was left wondering why we stopped the one story to go to the other.  Admittedly it seemed that once the story got to a crescendo and the three characters were interacting in real time in the same scenes I was able to better transition and follow what was going on.

Finally, one last obstacle I struggled to navigate was the fact that the story was extremely depressing.  There were no light hearted moments at all, which makes sense given the subject matter I suppose, but honestly for me I need that break here and there.  I need something to keep me hopeful that in the end it will all be alright.  The small attempt at doing so (Will’s desire to be Claire’s boyfriend) fell flat for me and was honestly more of an attempt to tie Will in with Carrie’s story.  It did so effectively I guess but still, I would have enjoyed something uplifting and remotely happy somewhere.

In the end, I imagine the author was trying to paint a realistic picture of how mental illness and abuse affects not only the lives of those who carry it with them but also those around them.  In that regard I do think the story was in a way successful.  I certainly felt anxiety and stress and discomfort I imagine that family and friends of sufferers must endure on a daily basis.