This one was not for me. I was not a fan of the main character LONG inner monologues and actually found myself quite bored when reading it.

This was a powerful book. I really liked how strong the family dynamic was, and especially how supportive the dad was in his own way. The main character Joel definitely grows throughout the story. He makes some really terrible choices, but he's a good kid underneath it all. The book addresses some tough ideas in a very digestible way.

I had requested this book with the intent to read it but as more and more time passes I don't know if that will happen. When I read the synopsis when I requested this book I was interested but now I'm not longer sure if this is a book that I want to read. Thanks for the opportunity to read

Oh boy. This book was not exactly my favorite. The narration is basically a very long internal monologue of our main character, Joel. This includes mindless ramblings and run-on sentences that take up the space of a large paragraph. I’m a really big fan of stories being character-led, but I completely hate it when a character tells the story instead of showing. There’s a bunch of “he did this” and “then we did that”.

The story itself gets way muddled. By the summary, I thought the book was going to be about a boy who lost his best friend and is trying to get through the next school year without him with the help of a few unconventional friends, but I still not quite sure what the book was really supposed to be about. Death of a friend, crush on a girl, mental health, homeless vets, drunk driving, making new friends, religion and other social topics were hit on, but made the story overwhelming. Plus, there is a very excessive use of language (f bombs everywhere!).

Overall, Words We Don’t Say just doesn’t work has a cohesive story for me.

I don't even remember anything about this book, except for my one reading update over a year ago saying: this reads like a wannabe John Green novel. Don't know if that sounds appealing to you, but it certainly wasn't to me. I remember this book reading like cardboard so I DNF'ed about 25% in.

Words We Don’t Say was such a touching, heartfelt book that looks at what it is like to try to move past a tragedy. So beautiful.

This book is a lot. Although Joel doesn't communicate a lot, the reader is granted access to his innermost thoughts and the words he never sends.

I often found this book difficult to process. Joel is such a wounded soul. I love that his first instinct is to say exactly what pops into his mind but then he edits the response to create a politically correct response. I really enjoyed how kind and caring Joel honestly was. His love for his family was evident in his interactions. I felt that the journal was the perfect way for him to express himself and share his feelings with his bestie no matter where his bestie was now. A great read!

Joel is getting by. He's attending school, doing his volunteer work, fantasizing about Eli - the girl he knows is out of his league, and he's even mastering drivers' training. Oh, and he's also writing hundreds of text message drafts that will never be sent - call it his virtual journal.

At times hilarious, at times heartbreaking, Joel's attempts at dealing with a tragic loss don't always make sense, but with a little help from his family and band of misfit friends, he's got more than a chance!

DNF'd at 30%, wasn't a fan of the characters or plot. Not my cup of tea, my own fault for requesting a book I wasn't truly interested in.

Really intriguing and the use of the out of order narrative helps to drive the plot and keep you interested.

I couldn't get into this book for some reason so I passed it along to my coblogger so it could get a review.

So in the beginning of this book I didn’t feel like this book was going to be that good of a book, but as I read on the book became better. The book, while wrote in a weird fashion, works well for the main character’s thought process. I think that the thought pattern of the main character is fairly realistic to one that suffers from PTSD/anxiety. I also felt that the author did really well with discussing socially relevant issues that are otherwise hard to discuss. I think that the book has excellent reread potential.

However, the book is so weirdly written that readers might not make it to the point where things start to click. The book is very long winded in places and the pacing is all over the place. The book also seems to suffer from the Stephen King syndrome of droning on and on about random events or things. I think the book is very interesting and definitely a reread book for me, but it’s just really hard to get into overall.

Verdict: Beautiful book with reread potential.

I first want to thank Netgalley for giving me permission to read this title. The book was an amazing read. I think that I will most definitely be ordering this book to put on the shelves at our library. I believe that the teens will thoroughly enjoy it.

For the most part, I was enjoying this story up until I got nearer to the end when a huge event took place and it seemingly came from out of left field.

The writing style won't be for everyone. It's told in first-person perspective, and while I can kind of guess what the author was going for with the stream-of-consciousness writing, I personally don't think that this was the book to benefit well from it. Stream-of-consciousness writing isn't easy to execute, and with a book that's ninety-percent internal monologue (exaggeration), the constant run-on sentences started to become too much and the more I kept reading, the more I wanted to scream at Joel -- the main character -- to slow down and breathe.

Joel's stream-of-conscious thoughts, I believe, were to showcase how neurotic he is, and for the most part, that comes off really, really well. He's a self-diagnosed hypochondriac who spends way too much time on WebMD looking up random symptoms and then applying them to himself and his family. I'm not entirely sure what his hypochondria had to do with the rest of the story, but I would have to guess that it also went to show his neuroses. I think that could have been shown and done better than bringing hypochondria into play, but I'm not going to assume that I know why the author did what she did.

This book, first and foremost, seems to be dealing with grief, and what that means to different people. The concept surrounding this story is an interesting one because of the way it is told. You have the stream-of-consciousness, and most chapters end with a one-sided text conversation that's used as a sort of journal for Joel's thoughts in place of an actual journal.

On the subject of the text messages, that was the thing that drew me into the story to begin with. The idea that this character, with hundreds of unsent texts on his phone for whatever reason, is an interesting one, and so I went into the book thinking it was going to be something completely different than what it was. That's no fault of the author, by the way. If anything, it's more so the fault of the synopsis, because you're being led to believe that The Thing That Happened is something major, big enough for Joel to feel as if he cannot talk to or open up to anyone in person, which is why he drafts text messages but doesn't send them.

The Thing That Happened, I'm unsure if the synopsis is hinting at Joel's best friend's death, or the incident that happens near the end of the book. I'm inclined to believe that it's about the best friend's death, but the fact that it's confusing to me is just another reason why this book disappointed me. This is where the stream-of-consciousness was more a hindrance than a help.

The story also tries to tackle mental illness and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in its various forms, but focusing more specifically on homeless veterans since, for a community service project, Joel and his friends volunteer every Wednesday at a soup kitchen serving food to the hungry, most of them homeless veterans, and I think this plus the grief and mental illnesses briefly touched upon are why this story came across as a bit of a mess and all over the place: there was just too much trying to be accomplished and it didn't work out as well as it probably could have. Especially with the shocking turn of events towards the end.

A lot of the characters ended up falling flat for me. The only one I was able to kind of connect with was Joel, and that's just because he's the narrator of his story. We don't really get to know more about what his mom is like except that she's most likely the one he gets his hypochondria from; his dad is a seemingly successful mechanic, and Joel helps out in the shop on occasion (we're told this, but never actually see it); and his little brother, all we really learn about him is that he wets the bed a lot, and every time it happens, he goes to sleep in Joel's room, but nothing is ever done about the bed-wetting because their mom lives by the, "If you ignore it, it'll stop," mentality, which obviously isn't healthy.

I wouldn't say she's a "bad" mother -- she's not. It's clear that she loves her kids, and she's a YA parent who gives a shit, so kudos to the author for making that decision. I just kind of wanted to learn more about her character through mother-son interactions, but I didn't really get that, and all I learned about his dad is that he's a baseball fanatic who's always sitting in front of the television watching a Yankees game than he is doing anything else.

Joel's friends aren't much better, either. You have Eli, a girl who's a friend that our main character has been in love with for years but afraid to do anything about; there's Benj Kutcherson, the new kid in his class who has no friends because apparently every student at their school thinks he's some kind of psychopath who killed his parents (and I still have yet to understand how that rumor came to be, or if it was just for the sake of the story); and then there's Andy. Andy is Joel's best friend from Kindergarten, and from the beginning you're aware that something happened to him, and pretty quickly you make the connection that Andy is no longer alive. How he died, I'll leave that for you to find out, should you read this for yourself.

3.75⭐️
Joel Higgins is in love with Eli, volunteers at the community soup kitchen, and tries to avoid the reality of what happened to his best friend Andy last year. In his attempts to keep his feelings hidden, he writes text messages to the people in his life, but never actually follows through with sending them.

For the vast majority of this book, I felt like it wasn’t really going anywhere and although enjoyable, I just felt like it was okay. The writing was just a little too simplistic to me and stunted. Granted that could be on purpose due to the nature of the storyline, but I felt like it could have packed a more meaningful punch for the first half if the writing wasn’t quite so choppy. About 70% in, things all started making sense and the one thing you are wondering about the whole story is finally revealed. All of the metaphors start falling into place and I really started loving the storyline and finished the remainder of it in just a few short hours without thinking about it. I seriously loved Joel’s family and how they try so hard to do the right thing for their sons and I laughed out loud quite a few times. I enjoyed the social awareness that this book has but at times it just felt rushed and force-fed with the incessant google searches each time there is a new social issue brought up, and trust me, there are A LOT. Homelessness, drunk driving, gun control, mental health, veteran care, and the list goes on.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I really liked this book, but I feel like it could have been done better, especially when it’s such a short book trying to tackle all of those social issues. I’m really critical of books when they have such potential to be a 5 star book that I could potentially incorporate into my curriculum as a teacher. If this had just been a little better, I could have easily justified teaching this.

I really loved this book! This book was so touching to read all the unsent messages that Joel saves as drafts. He send messages to his Principal, Eli (the girl he likes) and his friend Andy. It was so real to see how he worked at the soup kitchen interacting with Veterans and having to deal with his raw emotions of anger. I think overall this book can be highly relateable. I super encourage this book to be read.

When a gun enters the story, you know that a gun will go off in the story. This story still held enough twists that I couldn't anticipate them all. The main character has lost his best friend (reminds me a little of the Anderson's Wintergirls) and is dealing with the death by writing, and not sending, texts to everyone: the lost friend, the crush, the principal. He is dealing with some heavy depression which could be triggering but the character development and tight plotting moves me toward putting this in the middle school library.

Title: Words We Don’t Say
Author: K.J. Reilly
Genre: YA
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Joel Higgins has almost 1,000 unsent text messages on his phone. He can say whatever he wants there. He can talk to people he just can’t seem to find words for in person. Like Eli, the girl he has a crush on.

His best friend, Andy, is gone. The new guy, Benj, talks a lot but Joel doesn’t know quite how to take him. He failed the SATs. The only bright spots in his days are volunteering with Eli at the soup kitchen.

Then there’s the wounded vet Joel meets. The bag hidden in the garage. And the problem of all those Corvette Stingrays. Joel sees so many problems and has so many questions, but all he can do is type another text message he won’t send.

I really enjoyed this book, even though I sometimes have problems clicking with male narrators. That wasn’t the case here. Joel is such an honest character and getting inside his head was easy. You should definitely read this!

Words We Don’t Say is the new novel by K.J. Reilly.

(Galley provided by Disney-Hyperion in exchange for an honest review.)

This book is one of the most honest portrayals of teenage brains, especially an anxious one, and is SO spot on that I think teenagers will recognize themselves in the book and adults will see flashes of their past. It sounds cliche, but this book did make me laugh at parts and sob at parts. In fact, this book manages to deal with a LOT of issues without being cliche. Some topics covered are banned books, teachers, cancer, family dynamics, PTSD, treatment of veterans, homelessness, budgets, love, loss, and friendship. That sounds like it could be a really heavy handed book, but having worked in a high school I can see how many of these issues are piled upon students and to think their lives are less complicated is to downplay how hard it is to be a teenager today.

This book is written in a manner that the reader gets an almost stream of consciousness look at our main character Joel’s life. We see this through the conversations he has, as well as the hundreds of text messages he has written and never sent. He fake texts three people, the girl he likes (but it isn’t cheesy, which is hard to find sometimes in YA), his friend Andy who we know isn’t there anymore although we don’t find out why until the end of the novel, and the principal of his school. I don’t want to spoil this book by talking about the context of his texts but I recommend this book for the adventure of following Joel’s thoughts and his life because watching him grow and recover from loss is a worthwhile journey.

Thank you NetGalley for an early arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"So now I had to not only make sure that I spread the peanut butter thinly, but I also had to make sure to spread the jelly real thin because I didn't want to kill anyone."

Joel Higgins has hundreds of words he won't say in the form of unsent texts sitting in his phone. They're all addressed to either his best friend, Andy, his crush, Eli, or the school principal.

Every Wednesday Joel is working at the soup kitchen, with Eli and Benj, where they serve food to the homeless.

One day Joel stumbles upon a shanty in the woods and he begins leaving food and socks for the person who lives there. Eventually he learns that it's one of the men from the shelter because Rooster corners him against a tree and hands him something that changes the course of Joel's life.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly what this book is about because it includes a myriad of topics: homelessness in this country, PTSD, depression, grief, to just name a few. Several characters deal with these topics in their own ways.

Joel's long, breathy rants help give this read a quick, funny voice and it will appeal to young readers, for sure.

The romance is on the light side and I appreciate that.