Books › I Fell in Love with Hope
I Fell in Love with Hope
416 pages
A devastatingly poetic ode to found family, fleeting moments, and the terrifying bravery required to love when time is running out.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like holding your breath in a sterile hospital room while watching a brilliant, fleeting sunset. It is an unapologetically emotional, tear-jerking experience that wraps you in a suffocating yet tender atmosphere of grief, illness, and fierce rebellion. The prose is highly lyrical and metaphorical, leaning heavily into poetic angst to capture the raw, bleeding hearts of its characters. It moves at a steady, reflective pace, allowing the reader to sit with the heavy weight of mortality and the bittersweet joy of found family. This is a story designed to shatter your heart and then carefully piece it back together, perfect for readers who crave devastatingly sad but ultimately hopeful explorations of love, loss, and the courage it takes to let someone in when the end is already written.
- Mood
- heartbreaking
- bittersweet
- tear-jerking
- intimate
- Tone
- earnest
- poetic
- melancholic
- defiant
- tender
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- found family · courage to love · mortality and illness · survivor's guilt · finding light in darkness
- The writing
- Lyrical and deeply metaphorical, prioritizing raw emotional resonance and poetic angst over straightforward narrative.
- The arc
- Moves from a fiercely guarded, grief-stricken isolation to a vulnerable, terrifyingly beautiful surrender to new love and fleeting joy.
- Who it's for
- Readers who actively seek out emotionally devastating, tear-jerking stories about tragic romance and fiercely loyal found families.
Content notes
- suicide
- terminal illness
- death of a loved one
- medical trauma
- grief
- child abuse
About the book
Against the unforgiving landscape of a hospital, I fell in love with a mischievous, sun-eyed boy who became my only joy in that desolate place. That’s what made it all the more soul-crushing when he committed suicide in front of me.
Since then, I've sworn never to love anyone again. With three exceptions: My friends, Sony, Neo, and Coeur, a little gang of rebellious, dying kids. Sony leads the charge with the air of freedom and only one lung to breathe it. Neo, a bad-tempered and wheel-chaired writer, keeps track of our great deeds from stealing to terrorizing our nurse. Coeur is the beautiful boy, the muscle, the gentle giant with a failing heart.
Before death inevitably knocks down our doors, my thieves and I have one last heist planned. A great escape that will take us far from abusive parents, crippling loss, and the realities of our diseases. So what happens when someone else walks through the door? What happens when a girl joins our party and renders me speechless with her mischievous smile? What happens when she has suns in her eyes, and as terrified as I am to lose again, I start to fall?
Trigger warnings found in foreword
Description from Open Library.
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