I watch eagerly for the next dumpster. 
 I can honestly say that I never figured there'd ever be a time to start a review with a comment about dumpster diving. But here we are. This is what I took away from Safekeeping - where there's a will, there's a dumpster. 
 Let's get this straight...I'm not knocking the will to survive. We'd probably all do whatever it took to keep going, were we faced with similar circumstances. In the case of this book, however, I was a bit fuzzy on the circumstances. All I knew was that shit had hit the fan, our main character had come back to the states from a trip to Haiti, and she was in trouble and headed for Canada. 
 Then a whole lotta random stuff happened. She traveled, she stopped, she met a companion. 
 OOOHHH but WAIT! There were TONS of pictures! 
 Stuff like this! 
 At first, I was excited. The idea of having these beautiful black and white illustrations to show off the story intrigued me. 
 But then it started to look like pictures were being thrown in for the sake of having pictures. Just because there's a mention of blueberries doesn't mean you have to have a picture of blueberries on the page. I'm still unsure what a cow (is this even a cow? I might be way off on my farm animal knowledge) has to do with the words on this page...I guess the connection is rain. 
 I know that life is a journey, not a destination, but sometimes the journey needs to be more than just day-to-day survival. This story might have worked for me if I had been shown a substantial amount of the moments spent in the "inbetween" as notable moments in time. Instead, it felt like I was reading a lot of filler. At the end of this journey, it was as if I'd gone along for the ride and didn't really feel any sort of reward for my effort. 
 Maybe I was unimpressed because I have read a story before in which not much else happened outside of the characters' day-to-day survival, yet there was some sort of spark of life which compelled me to become fascinated with the process. (in case you were wondering, it was this book : Into the Forest - which was beautifully written). In the case of Safekeeping, I never found myself caring. I only felt melancholy. 
 When a person doesn't care much about the outcome, you lose the reader. This is what happened to me. 
 Are there people who would enjoy this book? Oh yes. Absolutely. The style of writing was not without merit. There will be a specific type of reader who will like this story. I'd recommend it for anyone who cares less about the big picture (the before, the after, the 'how did we get here') and more about what's happening in the here and now. If you can see yourself as the kind of person who would like to go on a journey with Radley as she searches for her parents and scavenges for food, then you might actually want to check this out. 
 This book was provided from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.