A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares / Krystal Sutherland

2.5/5

A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares is a coming-of-age novel about facing your fears, written in a melancholy tone and with subtle supernatural and mystical threads in it that lend the novel a dreamy feel.

The first thing that surprised me when I opened the book, on the very first page, was that it is written in third person. From the blurb Semi-Definitive List is sold as a novel with a humorous and witty protagonist, so I had assumed I would be reading from Esther's point of view. That it's written in third person was a surprise, but neither a good nor bad one, and didn't take away from the wittiness the blurb promised. In fact, third person allowed Sutherland to expand the range of narration from sarcastic teen to dramatic metaphors and emotional wisdom reminiscent of The Book Thief. After all, this is a book about Death, with a capital D, which leads me to how Semi-Definitive List personifies Death. I like Sutherland's imagination of Death because her description of her (or him) is similar to one I would imagine, and found the side plot of Esther's grandfather and his run-ins with the incarnate of Death to be one of the highlights of the novel. I found the ending of this storyline though, and how it relates to Esther, to be a little cheap.

So why the two-and-a-half star rating? Semi-Definitive List is, before anything else, a book about mental illness. While it started off strong with a sassy protagonist and a fast pace, it soon slowed down. It puttered to almost a complete stop about a fourth of the way in, and then ever so slowly the gears of plot began to turn again. They creaked and groaned and warmed up for maybe another one hundred pages, until Jonah and Esther had a little spat and some very hurtful and very honest things were said. (I would like to say that this scene is one of my favorites of the novel, because Jonah finally says the things that I wanted to say to Esther but didn't know how to put into words, so keep an eye out for this scene!)

Esther can be trying at times, but if you asked me what bothered me the most about her I would have to say all of her mental blocks, and this is the same problem that I have with nearly every single character in this novel. They all have mental blocks and they all have their problems and their demons. This is a novel about mental illness, and Sutherland does a very good job portraying it. But the novel was slow, and just like Esther acknowledges in the novel, people can only take so much of your mental illness before they get tired of it. I enjoyed learning about each character but Sutherland spent too much time introducing instead of developing. Several chapters are dedicated to Esther and Jonah knocking off the fears on her list, and it gets very repetitive. At around fear 12/50, I got so scared that I was going to have to read through all fifty fears that I actually flipped through the rest of the novel to see if the chapters were numbered up to fifty (and thank god they weren't, otherwise I might've stopped reading right then and there).

A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares is very similar to Patrick Ness's The Rest of Us Just Live Here and I would recommend it to fans of Ness's novel and fans of The Book Thief, although I would recommend The Rest of Us Just Live Here before Semi-Definitive List because it is shorter, sweeter, more touching, and more concise. Semi-Definitive List is not a bad book; its portrayal of mental illness is very well-done. But other than making strides in awareness of mental illness, A Semi-Definitive List lacks purpose.