Review: Emotional, dark, but SO worth it
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 17, 2014
Nicki DeStasi’s debut novel, Worth It, is a great dark, emotional read. The journey Anna has to travel to find happiness and joy is long, dark, and full of pain. When she meets Jed, she doesn’t think she is good enough for him, or anyone really. She has struggled for the past 6 years to move past all the painful events in her life but still struggles on a daily basis.The first 10% of this book was very hard to read. This is where the emotional low points of Anna’s life take place, everything from a neglectful father and depressed mother, to a physically abusive boyfriend and self-harm. With each event that passed in Anna’s life, the sick feeling in my belly grew. Not having experienced those things myself I can’t say it’s an honest representation, but it certainly felt honest as an outsider looking in. I will say that for some people, this first bit may be too much to continue reading, too graphic, too honest, too real. If chapter 4 hadn’t started to look a little bit lighter, like something good might start to come into Anna’s life, I’m not sure I could have kept reading.There were times when I felt like her healing was happening pretty fast, but then considering she had been living with the pain for 6 years, bottling it up for 2, when she starts opening up and letting someone good in, it was like the floodgates were opened for that pain to work it’s way out.Jed is kind of an average guy as far as life experiences. Compared to Anna, though, he has had a normal, almost boring life. He has a loving family, no skeletons in his closet. He’s just looking for someone to settle down with, and when he meets Anna he thinks she might just be the one. That conviction causes him to hold on and push Anna to open up, even as she continues to keep things hidden from him. He learns to read her and calls her on her shutters, letting her know that he won’t push too hard, but someday she needs to let him in.As Anna begins to open up to Jed, they work to help Anna move beyond her past to that happily ever after she dreams of. But the bumps they find along the way had me feeling like I was on a roller coaster.After the emotionally crushing beginning, I loved this book. And even as ill as the beginning made me feel, it set up Anna’s background stronger than we as readers would have seen it had it only come in the form of flashbacks. This was not an easy read, but it was fantastic. From the points where it looks like everything is golden to those that shatter the calm, I did not want to put this one down. Because even when it looked like things were all on the way up, and the book was closing, something huge happens. I was in tears, I was shocked, I was ready to hate the end of the book. But you know what? It was totally worth it.