All We Could Have Been

by Te Carter

162 days.
 
That’s how long Lexi needs to survive at her new school. Every year, she starts somewhere else under a new name, hiding in plain sight for as long as she can manage. Her record is 134, but it's senior year now and if she can make it till June, she can disappear into the real world. Maybe a big city, where no one recognizes her and no one knows about her brother and what he did.
 
But this time things are different. This time there’s her new friend, Ryan, who makes her believe that she belongs somewhere. This time there’s Marcus, the boy looks at her in a way no one has before. This time she’s actually started to miss her older brother, Scott, even though she knows she shouldn’t. He was the boy who hung out with her reading comics and riding bikes. The boy who applied Band-Aids to scraped knees and chased away spiders. But he’s also the reason that she’s been in hiding away from the world, and from herself.
 
It turns out you can't really run away from who you are. Eventually, it catches up with you. 
 
It’s just 162 days, but for Lexi that's a few days too many. 
 

• ISBN10: 147118000X
• ISBN13: 9781471180002
• Publish Date: 2 May 2019 (first published 23 April 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster Childrens Books
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 368
• Language: English

Reviews

[readingwithwrin]

2.5 stars.

Lexie is one of those characters that you want to like and you want to care about, but you just can't for some reason. Lexie herself isn't a terrible person, she's a senior in high school who is just trying to make it through her last year. Her brother killing multiple people put her into this situation where she is being blamed for what he did still after all these years. Its a terrible situation to be in and one that affects her whole family.
Lexie has tried to control any part of her life that she can and she does through the clothes she wears, and how she puts on a persona to hide her real self. She decides one day to trust someone and they actually understand her and see her for her. They don't care about what her brother did. This was a big turning point for Lexie and one that I wish she had had earlier in her life so she could have had more 'normal' experiences where she wasn't having to act all the time.
Overall this book was just kind of meh for me. I kept getting this sinking feeling in my stomach while reading it and I can't explain why. I had no real problems with any part of the story itself, it was put together nicely and I even found myself liking multiple characters. I just never found myself being drawn into the story and really truly caring about any of the characters.

This book just wasn't for me and that's okay.

[Liz (Bent Bookworm)]

~*Check out all my reviews over on The Bent Bookworm!*~

For all the ways I want to disappear and not let people see me, it still cuts me every time they don’t.

All We Could Have Been was a very emotional book. While it is YA, it tackles some very adult themes and thoughts – maybe because the main characters, while still teenagers, have both experienced life events that forced them to grow up very quickly. It seems to be marketed as a thriller, which isn’t entirely accurate as it mostly focuses on the aftermath of a crime rather than the events around the crime. There are some flashback sort of memories about it though, so I guess maybe that’s why…YA thriller seems to be a hard genre to pin down.

Feels

I hurt so much for Lexi. For Marcus, too, but mainly for Lexie. She has been so scarred by her brother’s actions and the hatred that people in general turned on her family after his crime, that she has (as many of us do) started to believe it of herself.

You ruin everything, I remind myself. There’s nothing you can keep safe.

Lexie’s parents have tried, but they’ve been dealing with their own trauma, and haven’t entirely kept up with their very nearly adult daughter. Their best advice to her is to lay low, not attract attention, and please-for-the-love-of-god maybe consider not color coding her clothes to the day of the week. Despite sending her to a therapist, they seem to have no grasp of how important coping mechanisms are to Lexie, even something as small as clothing colors.

I also caught a case of the feels for Lexie and Marcus together. They aren’t the most romantic couple – their relationship is built more on a need for support and understanding that they can’t seem to find from anyone else. While I wouldn’t ever *recommend* a romantic relationship based on such, the fact is that it happens often, I’ve been IN a relationship like that, and sometimes it is what people need at that time. Such relationships may not be the most lasting, but they have their place.

Lexie grew SO MUCH in the course of this story. She’s not perfect, or “fixed” as some might be inclined to call it, but she makes so much progress. She keeps trying. Which, as anyone with depression or anxiety can tell you – IS HUGE. Sometimes it is so difficult to keep trying.

Characters

Aside from Lexie, there is an entire cast of other interesting people! This made me really happy because often secondary characters are so similar I can’t remember who is who or did what.

- There is, of course, Marcus – who is supposed to be this bad boy with a horrible reputation, when all he really seems to be is a kid who did what he had to do to survive and ended up getting swept under the rug by the school system.

- Ryan is Lexie’s first real friend at her new school, and he has a secret too, but one that’s entirely personal. Ryan is asexual, which has caused him some grief at school and is something he really struggles with. He has come to accept it about himself but isn’t ready to be public about it. I really like Ryan, until about the middle of the book, when he does something that seems entirely selfish and unreasonable and very out of character, IMO. Meh.

- Chloe – Chloe is somewhat petty and self-centered, but she has a respect for human feeling that a lot of people don’t. I can respect her, in the end, even if I didn’t really like her.

- Aunt Susie – I love adult characters that I can empathize with. This is probably less of a big deal for the intended audience of All We Might Have Been, but as an adult reader I totally felt a kinship with her. She is Lexie’s mother’s sister, and while she is trying to be the “parent” figure Lexie’s parents want her to be, she ends up treating Lexie more like an adult. Huge props.

Setting

Most of the book takes place in and around Lexie’s high school – the one she’s starting at the beginning of her senior year in hopes she can make it 160 days. Normally I’m annoyed by school settings, but this one didn’t bother me, I think because it was much more character focused than it was on any particular setting.

Negatives

Mainly Ryan’s abrupt character switch in the middle of the story. I felt like it was unnecessary and really sad – and very NOT in character for him. It really dampened the entire rest of the book. Also in the beginning there is some weird, over-the-top descriptions that really threw me for a loop…I think maybe the author was trying to get Lexie’s sort of dry, sarcastic humor across but it really just felt strange.

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