The Place Between Breaths

The Place Between Breaths by an na

This book was published on March 27, 2018. I got my hand's on an advance reader's copy, so undoubtedly there will be some differences between the version I read and the published version.

Alright, so up front, I'm going to just say I WILL discuss the ending of the book in relation to the whole book towards the end of this blog post. There's going to be spoilers like whoa, but later. ...later.

An amazon summary, "From master storyteller and Printz Award–winning author An Na comes a dark, intensely moving story of a girl desperately determined to find a cure for the illness that swept her mother away, and could possibly destroy her own life as well.

Sixteen-year-old Grace is in a race against time—and in a race for her life—even if she doesn’t realize it yet…
She is smart, responsible, and contending with more than what most teens ever should. Her mother struggled with schizophrenia for years until, one day, she simply disappeared—fleeing in fear that she was going to hurt those she cared about most. Ever since, Grace’s father has worked as a recruiter at one of the leading labs dedicated to studying the disease, trying to lure the world’s top scientists to the faculty to find a cure, hoping against hope it can happen in time to help his wife if she is ever found. But this makes him distant. Consumed.
Grace, in turn, does her part, interning at the lab in the gene sequencing department daring to believe that one day they might make a breakthrough…and one day they do. Grace stumbles upon a string of code that could be the key. But something inside of Grace has started to unravel. Could her discovery just be a cruel side effect of the disease that might be taking hold of her? And can she even tell the difference?
Unflinchingly brave, An Na has created a mesmerizing story with twists and turns that reveal jaw-dropping insights into the mind of someone struggling with schizophrenia." AMAZON LINK OF JUSTICE

Grace has an internship at a leading gene sequencing research laboratory. She's trying to help unlock the gene sequencing to hopefully save her own grip on life one day. 

She lives with her father on the outskirts of town, and her father is constantly trying to recruit new scientists to help research gene sequencing.

Her mother left when she was a child and she has some memories of her, but her father is obsessed with the hope her mother will come back, and is very diligent in his job to make sure the right people are going to help solve the gene sequencing.

Grace also has a best friend, Hannah, who reveals she's pregnant at the very beginning of the book.

That's enough summary. FULL SPEED INTO SPOILER LAND.

So all the characters in this book seem to be a mega metaphor for Grace's mother. You know Grace's mother has schizophrenia. Grace herself seems to actually BE the mother she's remembering and doesn't want to become. The first convenient clue to that, is that Grace's mother and father are both orphans. So there's no family that can be traced to anywhere.

Secondly, about halfway through the book, you find out that Grace's Dad is actually dead. The laboratory employees know this, and there's even a lab tech by the name of Will who tries to engage with her life. Then, there's everything with Hannah. Hannah being pregnant, Grace being upset at the Dad of the baby for being such a jerk, and later in the book Hannah starts interacting with the Dad. The Dad who we know is dead. I want to say Hannah is the metaphor for Grace struggling on whether or not to keep the baby when she knows it will most likely develop schizophrenia as well.

The ending scenes show the main character in an institute of some variety where she's taking her medications, and she only really responds to the name of 'Mama'. I think the implication is that she had the child, and maybe the beginning of the book is her, or what she fantasizes her child is going through without her, or her husband.

There's just a lot to unpack about this book.

With that being said, I thought the beginning of the book was a little tedious, but because of my personal policy of trying to give every book the first 30% to redeem itself, I stuck with it. I'm glad I did on some level, because now I have a mystery maze to struggle through of trying to figure out what was a metaphor, and what was real. It's always interested me when authors make a book confusing and really play on the unreliable narrator to tell a deeper story. It gives me tons of questions, and with whatever answer I find, I know it's more of a reflection on what I believe in the world rather than what the author may have intended. So the conclusions I spelled out before, may be correct? But they are probably the way I fit all the pieces together to make this book's world make sense. Kind of like every reader is going to have their own perspective on the world. This is one of the books where the reader's perspective can make all the difference (in my oh so humble opinion).

I don't think there are any 'right' answers, and I think every conclusion drawn can be used to find the deeper truth of what the reader thinks of the world.

Or I could be entirely wrong.

Dun dun dunnnn

Either way, it was an interesting read.

Happy reading!