Indelible by Adelia Saunders

From Goodreads:
Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets - names, dates, details both banal and profound - and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank.

When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek. He's in Paris for the summer, studying a medieval pilgrimage to the rocky coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques was said to have washed ashore, covered in scallop shells. Desperate to make things right after her best friend dies - a loss she might have prevented - Magdalena embarks on her own pilgrimage, but not before Neil falls for her, captivated by her pale eyes, charming Eastern European accent, and aura of heartbreak.

Neil's father, Richard, is also in Paris, searching for the truth about his late mother, a famous expatriate American novelist who abandoned him at birth. All his life Richard has clung to a single striking memory - his mother's red shoes, which her biographers agree he never could have seen.

Indelible can be defined in two ways: "(of ink or a pen) making marks that cannot be removed", and "not able to be forgotten or removed." 

This book is a mixed bag: the concept is really neat, the writing style is really unique, but it's also kind of stale in certain parts and areas, and some creative decisions are kind of odd in places. An example: It follows three characters, Magdalena, Neil, and Richard. While it evenly splits up focuses, Richard's chapters are written in first person, and the other chapters are written in third person. Because of this, my favourite chapters were Richard's chapters. I like how the book itself was written. It invoked a sort of empty, sad feeling sometimes, especially with Richard's story. Parts of Magdalena's journey were also relatable. 

Besides Richard, I found it very difficult to connect to any of the characters (and even Richard had his moments of not being relatable). While Magdalena did have motivations, we don't learn anything about her all too much. Same goes for Neil. The simple truth is that they are not the most likable characters? Like, it's cool that Magdalena doesn't let her "gift" define her, but we don't really see her response to it all that often besides a "this is what it said on so-and-so's forehead." What I'm about to say is every English student's worst nemesis: "So what?" How does it connect? There are also very many loose threads that are meant to be important to the plot, or claim to be important to the plot, but they end up being ignored or brushed over. 

A thing that this book does well is relay the difficulty of grief, sorrow, and the inability to accept when to let go. When I mentioned there was a sort of empty feeling of sadness, I was associating it with the sections in which Magdalena is grieving for the loss of her best friend and Richard comes to learn the truth about his mother. Those parts were probably the best parts of the novel, because of the painful accuracy that Saunders delivers with. Grief is something that we carry with us, sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly. With the characters of Richard and Magdalena it's definitely the former, but in a very subtle way. We don't really get that with Neil. He's just sort of along for the ride. 

One thing that I thought was going to happen, and did, but not to the extent I hoped: not enough overlap in the stories of each character. There's an obvious connection between Neil and Richard and Neil and Magdalena, but they never really interact all that much. As I said it was kind of stale, and it says something that, according to my progress with Goodreads, it took me six days to finish a relatively short novel that clocks in at 271 pages. It wasn't a hard book by any measure. On the contrary, the writing style made it very easy to read. It wasn't form, it was content: I found it very hard to connect to the characters on a whole and there was very minimal plot development. I'm going to give Indelible a 2.5/5; it succeeded in writing style, concept, and the message of grief (which was moving), but ended up being very dry and stale, did not really move forward, and failed the "So What?" test. Indelible is not that indelible. The cover is pretty though.