Book Review: Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson

Breathe My Name is both an electric and terrifying story that you can’t help but devour in big, heaping gulps.

Frances Robinson is a quiet, mouse-like eighteen year old living in a beautiful house with a loving and devoted family. She has a great best friend and a charming (and completely cute) boyfriend named Nix who recently moved from Louisiana. Her life is the definition of a full and happy but Frances has a secret. A secret about her past; about her childhood, her three sisters and a mother and father she had before being adopted by the Robinsons. She and her childhood family lived in the country of Fireless, a country that was beautiful, mysterious and made up by her birth mother. But as much as Fireless was make believe, the lure of the country led Frances’ mother into a maddening depression until she one day, in the quiet of a morning like any other, she suffocated her children one by one with a pillow. Frances’ mother led her into the bedroom where she would suffocate her too and when Frances saw her three younger sisters laid out on the bed, their eyes open and their bodies limp with the life snuffed out of them, she began to fight. She fought until she escaped and she escaped all the way to Alabama with the Robinsons; states away from her childhood home, her deranged mother, her father who was hardly around due to working long and strenuous hours, and away from her three sisters who had been murdered at their mother’s hand.

Frances starts noticing a man in a car several times outside of her house and outside of her school and one day she comes home to find the man standing in her kitchen with her parents. He tells her that her mother, who plead out of jail time for murdering her children due to mental insanity, is in a halfway house and has sent a letter for her. When Frances opens this letter, it is filled with several blank sheets of paper–Except for one that simply says “I need to see you. Please come right away. We have to finish.”

Frances makes the decision to travel the few states away from her family in Alabama to the halfway house her mother is now located in. In typical “curiosity killed the cat” fashion, Frances needs to see what happened to her mother and most of all, what ‘We have to finish.” means.

Her journey leads her back to her childhood–The good times that she had with her mother and also the last day that she saw her. It sends her through a mix of emotions and also feelings she never knew that she could have. Breathe My Name is a beautifully written novel full of surprises that intrigues you with its story the moment you start reading it. I loved the story and found it to be better than I thought it would be when I first read the synopsis on the inside cover. It also brought me back to my own childhood, having been abandoned by my own mother after six years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. It arouse feelings and thoughts inside of me that I didn’t know I could have and I found myself instantly sympathizing with Frances and the mixture of feelings she was having and the nightmares that awoke her night after night about her childhood.

Breathe My Name is a novel that will chill you to the bone and then console you.

Rating:
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