TW: Suicide, eating disorders, SA, self harm, chronic illnesses, abuse, mental illness

“I think the worst feeling in the world is telling someone you’re in pain and hearing them say there’s no wound.”

And this book definitely leaves a wound. I Fell in Love with Hope, published by Lancali in 2022, is a book about the greatest thieves of the world: time, disease, and death.

Time, disease, and death are who the main characters are trying to get revenge on for taking lives from them. Sam, the main protagonist, is telling a story of how the “love of [their] life wants to die.” Sam is a brilliant, brave, and awfully broken character. They’ve never experienced love that lasts a lifetime .After they lose the sweet boy they fell for, they vowed to never love again. They hadn’t felt or shown love until this beautiful, sun-eyed girl, Hikari, showed up in the hospital, having no intention of getting better. She immediately joins Sam’s group in the hospital consisting of Neo, Coeur, and Sony.

Coeur, a teen boy dealing with an ill heart, grows close to Neo in his time spent in the hospital. Neo is in the hospital for his battle with anorexia. He wants to continue becoming less until he is nothing to overcome the abuse from his father. Coeur just wants Neo to feel the love neither of them felt. The two of them fill the emptiness of false love they had felt for years, with love for each other.

And then there’s Sony, my personal favorite. She completes the group with her sense of carelessness and wild energy. She carries a hit list on things to accomplish while she spends her days in the hospital. She initiated the idea to gain the years lost due to illness back.

All these characters take you through an emotional rollercoaster, of the happy moments and low moments in life. This book deals with themes of despair and hope, but I guess a simple way to summarize is when “despair fell in love with hope.”

Every line in this book has a beautiful meaning strung behind it, though there are a select few that stuck out to me (and that had me crying). They resonated with aspects of real life that can be found outside a fantasy novel. The first one is “Because all the corpses of my stars couldn’t compare to the one that faded into the dark. This one just shows the love Sam had for the boy they fell for, that no matter how many loves they have, none can ever compare to their first love.

The one that hit me like a truck was when Neo told Sam, “You know you never wanted us to be happy, Sam…You wanted us to feel loved, and we did.” Those words were something that Sam needed to hear at that moment. It gave them reassurance that the people they love felt loved. And I feel like it also puts the distinction between love and happiness into perspective. It shows that love is one of the strongest emotions to exist.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to find pieces of themselves; I know I found comfort in it. To anyone who has felt alone, lost, or ill, this book is made for you.

It has a soul. The characters come to life. Their story unfolds in front of your eyes. You become one with the delinquents of the hospital, and feel empty when they disappear after you turn the last page. But in the end, this book helped me find hope in places I didn’t believe hope could be hiding.