The Moment Before

by Suzy Vitello

[Leah]

When I spotted The Moment Before on Netgalley, I thought it sounded quite interesting. Novels about grief are really interesting, and I love diving in to novels like that. It’s taken me quite a while to finish the novel – really, starting a book over the Christmas and New Year period is never a good idea, as work gets in the way of doing anything over Christmas and New Year, especially reading, but after what seems like forever, I have finally completed the novel, and it wasn’t bad at all.

Brady and Sabine are “Irish twins”, born within a year of each other, so when Sabine dies, Brady’s life falls apart. She’s no longer the arty-sister of her school’s most popular girl, now she’s the girl-with-a-dead-sister, who can’t seem to care about anything or anyone any more. Her schoolwork has fallen to the wayside, and the only thing she still cares about is her artwork, it’s the only thing that keeps her grounded. Her parents marriage is falling to pieces, her dad is drinking more and more and her mother seems to be keeping secrets from everyone in the family, so when Brady finds herself hanging out with Connor Christopher, the boy blamed for Sabine’s death, she finds herself finding out things about Sabine she never thought possible, and she’s desperate to know everything.

The Moment Before was very interesting. I didn’t love-love it, but I also didn’t hate it, it was just sort of a middle-of-the-road kind of novel. It’s perhaps why it took me ages to finish reading it, because it seems to be quite a short novel, but it just seemed to take forever to finish. I really liked Brady. She’s my sort of girl; someone who isn’t immensely popular, who prefers her own company to that of the popular crowd, the only way we weren’t alike was that she’s quite arty and all of my drawings feature stick people. But I sort of felt that the novel didn’t offer any kind of resolution, there’s lots of secrets that come out about Sabine, but I’m still not entirely sure what happened to Sabine on the day she died, or what her relationship with Connor really was. Connor was an enigma, and I mostly liked him, but there were tons of unanswered questions, and, although the novel was wrapped up in a fashion, I still felt there should have been more answers about Sabine because there were tons of questions that needed answering.

I did think Suzy Vitello’s writing was awesome, she’s a very talented writer, and I definitely felt Brady’s grief, I just wanted a bit more resolution, a bit more of an answer to everything surrounding Sabine as it was quite mysterious. What made the novel slightly worse for me was definitely Sabine’s “friend” Martha. She was AWFUL. Every time she came onto the page, I wanted to slap her because she was so patronising towards Brady. I would not want a friend like her and I truly couldn’t understand why Brady didn’t tell her to get lost, because that’s what I wanted to do. The Moment Before was definitely an interesting read, it could have just done with more resolution. I wanted a definitive answer to Sabine, who was mysterious and enigmatic and seemed to have an entirely different life to the one Brady and her parents thought she had, though it was very interesting to learn it all, and I did really like Brady and Connor, I just wanted a bit more…