Voliton by Lily Paradis
Book Description:
You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach that stays with you, then tears you apart slowly at first, and all at once shreds every fiber of your being?
It’s because you’re contradicting the universe.
Everything lines up so perfectly that you couldn’t have imagined it to work out better, but then you have to go and do everything humanly possible to ruin it because you can’t stand to have it go right?
That’s what I did.
I did it because there’s a darkness that surrounds me, and I think I want it there.
My name is Tate McKenna, and my soul is blacker than my heart.
Giselle’s Review:
Every time I finish a novel, I flip to the beginning. I never know why, I guess it’s just something I do, like turning off a light switch or closing the door every time you leave a room.
So after finishing Volition, I landed on the dedication page…”For anyone who can’t let go of their Jesse.” Reading this sentence after reading Volition was kind of like getting hit in the face by a gust of air on a windy day (what a cliche saying, I know). It’s obvious it’s windy outside, but you don’t know how windy it truly is until you get hit by that gust of wind. I knew this book would leave an impact on me, but I guess I didn’t know how much so until I read that line and actually got goosebumps along my arms and legs and pretty much my entire body.
Volition is unlike any other book I have read and it is probably unlike any other book I will ever read because it makes you face and accept the difficult things. Volition is that book that will make you come to terms or at least make you come “face-to-face” with the way you are, the way you think, the way you go about your daily life. That’s probably one of the reasons I loved it so much and also struggled with it.
I don’t think I have a Jesse or a Hayden, or have I ever had one. Maybe I won’t get a Jesse or a Hayden, or maybe I already have a Jesse in my life that I don’t want to acknowledge and a Hayden I haven’t realized is there, but that’s my story.
This is Tate’s.
Life is unpredictable and up until reading Volition I had never really thought about the idea of a Jesse and a Hayden or any of those difficult choices we have to make, but in life difficult choices are inevitable. We have to choose between what is good for us and what is not and that’s probably the scariest part.
Volition- the power to make your own choice.
Volition will crawl inside of the deepest depths of you and it will embed itself into your soul, even if you don’t realize it, but Lily’s writing is just that powerful. While you’re reading this book and even after you finish reading it, your mind will feel like a broken carousel with no signs of stopping. Spinning and spinning and spinning.
More than a week after finishing Volition and I’m still having difficulties wrapping my head around what I read, and not because I didn’t understand it, although I’m not going to claim to I understand everything so maybe I didn’t,…but sometimes we just have difficulty wrapping our heads around the harsh realities of life. Volition has a lot of those harsh realities, but Lily Paradis executes this harshness, all the darkness, with such…raw power and emotion, you can’t help but try- want to accept it.
Volition will evoke every emotion possible from your psyche and you might not even realize it did until the end…but that is one of the powers of this novel.
So you might have noticed this review is more of a reflection than anything else, but that is because I want you to go into this novel blind and with an open mind (Cruel? Maybe. Necessary? Yes!) This novel might not appeal to everyone- hell, no one novel does, but even so, I definitely encourage everyone to try it out because in the end, you won’t be able to stop talking about it.
