Far From You follows Sophie who has become addicted to prescription medication following a car crash that left her in constant pain. Her life is wrapped up with Mina and Trev, brother and sister, the two people she loves most in the world.
Mina likes to play with fire. But I’m the one who gets burned.
Sophie witnesses the murder of Mina, the girl she loves. She doesn’t have time to grieve or get answers, because drugs are planted on her at the crime scene. Despite having got clean, everyone assumes the worst, that is was a drug deal gone bad, and Sophie is whisked off to rehab.
Once she’s free, she becomes determined to find out the truth and get justice for Mina. The strongest part of this book is the relationship between Sophie and Mina. It’s pretty obvious early on that it was more than friendship but the full context is revealed through flashbacks. Mina resists the relationship, pushes Sophie away and tries to hurt her.
It’s so sad that the two girls never got that time together where they could just be. It’s implied that Mina’s family wouldn’t be OK with her being a lesbian, that she wasn’t brought up to be OK with it, so she dates guys she doesn’t care about instead.
I don’t tell him how lucky he is, that he can just sit there and admit it, sheepish, but unashamed. Like it’s his right. Like it’s okay, because she’s supposed to belong to someone like him, instead of someone like me.
The narrative jumps around in time a lot. I think you need to establish the timeline somehow before doing this as I couldn’t keep up to start with. There is a lot packed in; the interconnecting relationships, Sophie’s injury and drug addiction, the murder investigation.
I picked this up for the character with chronic pain square of Diversity Bingo. I didn’t feel it was particularly insightful about living with constant pain and there were points it was easy to forget Sophie was suffering. I would have liked it to explore the impact of her having to give up her pain medication because of her addiction.
But this is the thing about struggling out of that hole you’ve put yourself in: the higher you climb, the farther you have to fall.
It was a reasonable book of its type but it’s not something I would be particularly drawn to had it not been a challenge read.
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Book Source: Purchased
