Review: The Cost of All Things

The Cost of All Things
Author: Maggie Lehrman
Publication Date:  May 12th 2015
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~ 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets We Were Liars in this thought-provoking and brilliantly written debut that is part love story, part mystery, part high-stakes drama.

What would you pay to cure your heartbreak? Banish your sadness? Transform your looks? The right spell can fix anything…. When Ari's boyfriend Win dies, she gets a spell to erase all memory of him. But spells come at a cost, and this one sets off a chain of events that reveal the hidden—and sometimes dangerous—connections between Ari, her friends, and the boyfriend she can no longer remember.

Told from four different points of view, this original and affecting novel weaves past and present in a suspenseful narrative that unveils the truth behind a terrible tragedy

My feelings are all over the place for The Cost of All Things, I wish I could say I loved it, but I didn't. I wish I could say I hated it, which I did at parts, but once it all comes together and clicks, I can't say I truly hated it either.

The thing is, I think a lot of people will be in the grey area, because taking aside the characters, the idea, the execution, the writing, is amazingly done. Seriously, nothing is without reason because if everything wasn't, The Cost of All Things would be a hot mess. It's hard to talk about because of spoilers, it's that kind of book where if one thing was out of place, it would fall flat on its face and just wouldn't work.

All of that was fine, I absolutely loved the messages it sent, in a place where you can get a spell to get what you want, it's kind of a  be careful what you wish for deal, because yes, you can get what you want, you can go to a hekamist-a witch-get a spell, change what you want to change, make it happen now, but there's a balance, a price to pay, it takes something away from you, but also, it takes something away from the people it effects, too. Who you affect. Fate has a funny way or correcting things that are artificially altered.

The Cost of All Things is very character driven, but the thing is, the characters are awful. I don't just mean they're not perfect-which they're not, nowhere near it, and yes, that's realistic-but they are well and truly awful. Their actions, the choices they make, I could deal with that, but the choices they make effects the people around them. Kay's, for example, is who I despised, because she not only did what she did, but she took the will of others away from them. Just no.

The only one I liked was Win, I won't say much about him because again, spoilers, but he's the only one that felt real, and he's the dead guy, so that's saying something.

So basically, the characters ruined this for me.

The Cost of All Things is about grief and how the different types affect different people and how they deal with it, how it shapes you and makes you grow, and how by taking that grief away, also takes a piece of you, too. Personally, the idea behind of that is pretty personal, I'm sure a lot of us wish we could take our feelings away from grief, forget how we felt about someone, but at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, that's there to make us. It's the natural course of life, right? We grow, we change, we wake up. We're human.

Rating: 2/5