1/28/2016

The last time we say goodbye by Cynthia Hand-book review

Hey Everyone, today I'm doing a review about a really sad book with a really hard topic in it. The last time we say goodbye is a heart-wrenching story about suicide and its consequences, also about grief, finding yourself, but most importantly about family. I finished this book yesterday, but I still think about it.
The story is about a girl, whose brother committed suicide a few months ago and she tries to deal with it. She doesn't really know what to do, she is just pushing everyone away and has panic attacks. As I got deeper into the story, I saw that she also cannot not deal with guilt, but at the beginning I didn't know, why she felt guilty at the beginning. Her psychiatrist gives her the assignment to write down what she remembers about her brother or to be exact the last time her brother was happy. She doesn't want to do it, but eventually she starts to do it. From her writings I could see and get to know Tyler and his story. He is typically the guy, who you don't want to die, but we all know he  is already dead. From the beginning of the book, I could sense that she is blaming herself for some reason as I wrote it earlier in this review. When I read the first few pages and I kind of started to get to know the characters better, I eventually saw mess. Everything about their lives was just apart. The hole family just wasn't okay. And I felt really bad, because if I think about it, they didn't communicate, even after everything happened. The mother developed an drinking problem and the dad just tried to forget. Lex was the only character, who made improvement and she also tried to help to everyone else towards the end. I'm warning you there is a love interest in this book and you're going to love it, because it wasn't a really strong line in the story, but it really was there all the time. It was the exact amount, this book needed, in order to not take the attention from the more serious topics in this book, such as family, love, and teenage suicide. Because a lot of kids out there are suicidal and depressed like Tyler was in this book in these days and their parents don't realize, what is happening inside of their head. It's really important to raise awareness about this issue, in my opinion it's a huge improvement that more and more writers are building mental-illness into their stories, in order to let people look into them a little bit more and maybe if we talk about these issues a little bit more often, then one day one person won't judge the other, because of mental-illness.
The only thing I was missing was more Tyler. Because I only got to read the letter which he wrote to Ashley and that just wasn't enough. I wanted to see into his head a little bit more, in order to understand him and his actions. I only got to see him trough Lex's eyes and that wasn't just enough. I understand that it was possibly, because the writer wanted to make her point of view the strongest in the book. She maybe wanted us to see the recovery from the actions, instead of undressing the big "Why?" question. Because sometimes we can not understand the things that happen to us in life, no matter how hard we are trying. Maybe we don't have to. We just have to except them and move on, maybe learn from it.
Hope you enjoyed reading this review, feel free to share your opinion in the comments.
Until next time,
Bianka

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