I Was Here | Gayle Forman | Reviewed by Christina
I Was Here is a
tense, deep story about a girl named Meg who commits suicide and the pieces she leaves behind for her best friend Cody to discover. When Cody travels to Meg's college room to
collect her belongings, she begins a journey she never thought she'd embark on.
Cody discovers secrets about her best friend, meets a boy and along the way,
discovers things about herself too. The story itself was super-quick to get
through, I read it in two sittings and really enjoyed it.
Cody asks for Ben's help despite being under the impression he screwed her best friend over and for
around 75% of the book, it made me really mad. Then I began to like their relationship/friendship and whilst they
became close through f-d up circumstances, I began to really root for them. Although
Cody was a bit naive at times, I did enjoy reading about her journey and her
discoveries along the way. The delicate
handling of the suicide topic was done well in my opinion, it wasn't over the top but it wasn't skimmed over either. The fine line
between experiencing a friends suicide and feeling those emotions for yourself
was explored and it's scary how easily somebody could sink into the kinds of deep thoughts they never realised they
were capable of. Romance was a back-up theme in this novel, after grief and
suicide and depression and I liked that it wasn' t the most important aspect of
the book, but still played a part. As I said before about being angry about how
the romance started, I do feel as though it probably didn't need to be in there
and the book would have hit much harder had it just focused on developing the
other themes fully instead.
I would recommend
reading this book as it's a quick, but not light-hearted read. If suicide is a
trigger for you, you should not read this book as it is discussed openly throughout.
This post was written by regular reviewer Christina, get to know her here.
*Received through NetGalley for an honest review.
Image from Goodreads.
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