Someone to Kiss My Scars was highly disturbing, emotional, and thought-provoking. The warning at the beginning of the book regarding its themes must be taken seriously, because this is a harsh read.

Characters: In some ways, I was able to connect to the characters quickly. They were realistic and honest, making it easy to sympathize with them. On the other hand, these characters experienced very drastic and intense feelings and events, so much so that my small mind can't even comprehend the pain. This made it difficult to understand where they're coming from.

Themes: As you can guess, Skipstone incorporated many thought-provoking themes throughout the entire story. There is evidence of motifs of friendship, self respect, family, abuse, self harm, love, and life throughout the book, a sign of a well written story. Even though Someone to Kiss My Scars may have scarred me, I also took away a few valuable lessons after reading it.

Other Notes: Someone to Kiss My Scars is a very emotional, explicit books that can and will trigger sensitive readers. I chose to skip certain scenes in this book that had explicit abuse, sex, violence in them. Fortunately, those scenes did not take away from the book as a whole, meaning you can read this story without having to read the whole book if you are uncomfortable.

Because it's a debut I resisted the urge to put the book down and kept reading—to say it was hard work is to put it mildly. I kept hoping for something to click within me, to make me care about and for these characters, to see the point of the story or understand all the good-rated reviews. But the story didn't work for me. It's too grim, the abuse and violence too gratuitous, the science crap about memory felt too explanatory, like a pretext, an excuse to cover it all, or for writing the story, I don't know. There's not even good dialogue to salvage the mess. I lost count of the times I rolled my eyes. (Example: “Don’t be so hard on yourself. When crap happens to us, we blame ourselves. Why? Because most people aren’t raped or abused, so we must blame ourselves for getting into such bad situations. But none of this was our fault.” Sounds like it's intended to a rape victim. Cheap.) I know it's hash and I'm sorry, but I feel like I have an obligation to tell; I can't believe how much disgusted pornography this book holds, and the worst part is it all comes from teens from the same high school: I don't even know how many of them have been either raped or engaged in an incestuous sexual relationship or otherwise abused or are kids’ pervs…what are the odds? This is sick, unbearable, and problem is there is nothing to counterbalance the horrors of it. Oh, and did I mention there's a school shooting in the sorry too? What's that for? Is the book really written only at shock value? What's the message? There are predators out there? Duh. Life’s tough? Okay… I cringe at the thought that it's apparently labeled YA. This is not fit for YA. Again, I'm sorry for the harsh tone of my review, but I have a 15-year-old and that's certainly not the kind of book I'd like her to consider. I need Hunter to take that memory out of my mind…

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual abuse, self-mutilation, rape, pedophilia, incest, murder, violence, child pornography, suicide, homophobia, alcohol drinking. There might be others too, so please BE AWARE when you go into this book because it is VERY DARK!

PROS:
• Raising awareness about child sexual abuse. I think this is a very important book to read, mostly during our days! Brooke Skipstone is an amazing brave author because she took this extremely hard subject and put it into a book. Some might hate or disapprove her because she chose to touch some hidden scars of our society, but I think most of us will see what she tried and managed to do with this book.
• The female lead character wasn't a breathtaking painfully beautiful girl with a slim perfect body. This thing made me so happy because we need more representation for curvy girls/women! This world might be full of slim, wasp shaped women, but also, curvy ones exist and they are beautiful and very worth loving too!
• Writing style. I have no idea if this is a debut novel or not, but I have enjoyed the writing style! It really made me feel like I was part of the book, for the most time, thing that it is rare to very rare for me.
• Shoved me in a roller coaster of my emotions. This book made me cry, smile, feel rage and anger, hate, pain, pure ravishing desire to fight and save those children.

CONS:
• Some points, mostly the ending, felt rushed. The sex scene between Jazz and Hunter, for example. I mean, they both were victims of sexual abuse, and just like that, after a couple of days and mostly after Hunter remembered what had happened to him, he was prepared to have sex with Jazz?! I don't deny their emotional connection, but really, after all that, it made no sense and was very hard for me to believe that Hunter, with all those fresh memories, was ready for it!
• The fact that Jazz was speaking for Hunter, without even really asking him first if he agrees or not. She almost always asked him if he can take more AFTER she was saying yes on behalf of him. This thing really pissed me off! As I have said in one of my updates, I understood her pain and her desire to save others too, but in those moments where she was doing this, it made me felt that she didn't really care about Hunter's pain, like she was seeing him as an object to help her reach her goal.

OVERALL THOUGHTS:
• I feel the need to repeat it, even now, that this is a very dark novel! Will hit you very hard and will show you the cruel and painful reality that often, most of us, choose not to see or acknowledge it because we choose to live in our fantasy worlds. These things happen! And happen more often than we ever think! THIS IS A WAKE-UP CALL!

I wasn't sure if I'd like this, but I'm glad I gave it a try. It's certainly not an easy read but it's written with huge amounts of compassion and empathy. Hunter and Jazz, the two leads, are just lovely: kind and strong despite everything the world has tried to do to them. And alongside the unflinching look at the dark side of human nature, there are some interesting ideas about memory and healing from trauma. Worth reading, but not for the faint-hearted.

Rating 4.5 stars

Someone to kiss my scars is about two teenagers called Hunter and Jazz.

Hunter can’t remember anything about his life more than two years ago. His mother and brother have apparently died in an accident, hunter himself is covered in scars and has been told this was a biking accident also.

He starts having disturbing visions, and soon discovers these visions are actually other people’s memories. His best friend Jazz vows to help him resolve this.

Jazz is just fantastic, my heart went out to her and what she has to go through with her alcoholic mother. The book is compulsively readable, there are new questions that present themselves in every chapter gripping you into the story.
This author has some imagination I thought the ideas behind the book were amazingly written.

I would recommend this book however please read the content warnings as it is not for faint of heart, it’s marketed as upper YA but I’m an adult and found some of the content quite disturbing particularly with me being a mother myself.