The characters are fifteen, and while readers tend to choose books featuring protagonists a little older than themselves, in this case the content is definitely more suited to YA. Nicu and Jess are beautifully realised characters, and the reader wants more for them than the bleak and strangely abrupt ending. But somewhere around the mid-point of the novel the catalogue of disasters befalling the couple feels too relentless, the abuses they suffer too gratuitous. Each writer has a finely tuned ear for accent and idiom, and the characterisation is pitch perfect.
Themes of domestic abuse, violence, bullying, social exclusion, low self-esteem and racism are explored through the dual narratives. Jess and Nicu meet doing community service, find refuge in one another and gradually fall in love. Jess lives with her mother and abusive stepfather her older brother has moved out, unable to tolerate the situation at home, and she has ‘fallen in with a bad crowd’. Overall, We Come Apart is a poignant, heartbreaking story of two different people brought together by strange circumstances. Nicu is a teenage boy from Romania, living with his family in the UK while they save enough money to return home and for him to enter into an arranged marriage with a girl from their village.
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