the words i wish i said: by Caitlin Kelly. I had doubts about this book and if it was even worth the read, but some sections spoke to me louder than others. My decision to buy this book came from Tiktok. I had recently been seeing it all over my for you page and everyone that talked about it, would give glimpses or even review the book. So I gave in and decided I would read it for myself. I wanted to see why everyone made it seem so special. Once I got my hands on the book, I could not take them off.

I found this book to be very interesting in so many ways. One of them was because the age that the author wrote this book was sixteen. So who better write and focus on the thoughts of a teenager, rather than one themselves. Another was the way and the placement of the chapters, I feel that they all went hand in hand and made sense in the way they were placed.

The book has a total of 5 chapters, these being labeled;

Chapter 1: Saving Myself, chapter 2: You Will Never Know, chapter 3: The Darker Pages, chapter 4: Realizations, and chapter 5: Questions of The Small World

Every single chapter had its way of expressing itself. It expressed such emotions and thoughts in an impactful yet simple way. As a teenager, I feel that our thoughts tend to be all over the place and hard to comprehend. This novel seemed to put it all into perspective and give a form of closure. It took my thoughts and explained them in ways I never could. 

Although fair warning this book can be a little dark and sad. I felt that it was something everyone would be able to find a relation with. I felt it was something that everyone should hear or come to terms with. 

I was beyond impressed with this book, I did not set my expectation too high. It still managed to exceed them. I was not expecting it to turn out the way it did, nor was it in any relation to the types of poetry books I like to read. I think that this book did give a certain type of peace and gratitude for how the world is looked at through teenage thoughts and hearts. I would recommend this book to anyone who needs some sort of clarification with their thoughts and wants to know that it is not just them that feels a certain way. Other people, such as myself and Caitlin Kelly feel it too. 

If I were to rate this book, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. Only because it seemed to take up more pages than needed, some pages only had one or two words on them. I understood that the impact of doing so was to keep you engaged, and it did an excellent job in doing so. I still think that if it were rearranged differently, it would be better, not only to save pages but to ensure that you are not flipping through pages and pages just to finish a complete thought or short story the author gave about her past. I feel that if the thought was arranged to fit onto one page, it could give the book a stronger character. I do not think doing so would make the book less engaging, only because the wording alone carried the book and made it hard to put down. Overall this book was very much worth the hype, and I feel like it can be something that would touch a lot of us teenagers in ways we never thought someone would explain for us to make sense of at our age.