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oofsharkz73 's review for:

Message Not Found by Dante Medema
5.0
challenging emotional funny hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

"It's not the secrets that matter when people we love die, but the memories we keep in our hearts."


"Bailey: He is wrong.
Look at us.
We know everything about each other.
V: come on.
you have to admit we have a few things we don't know about each other. we didn't meet until we were like 10.
and the part about everyone knowing a different side of a person. that's true."


Dante Medema's Message Not Found is an ode to the notion that everyone has the right to cope with grief in their own way. Bailey's use of the NewVision project to communicate with an AI version of her best friend is heart-wrenching, even more so when you realize the only reason she wants to uncover Vaness's secrets is to have closure and rid herself of the survivor's guilt that haunrs her. Message Not Found begins with Bailey being conflicted with what secrets may lay in the wake of loss, and we follow her on a poignant journey in which grief becomes a mystery with no easy resolution. 

Every page is filled with melancholy, pact with fraught emotion. I had trouble narrowing down the best quotes to show the impactfulness of Medema's words, but feel that these ones capture the vividness that she wrote with. 

"But I should have said something. I should have asked her to tell me the truth.
I should have grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes and told her that she couldn't get away with a lie because friends don't let friends leave in the middle of the night. They don't let each other get away with being intentionally vague about something that is very clearly bothering them.
But I didn't.
And I'll always, always live with that.
...I was reading the last page in the book of her life and I didn't even know it."

"I don't think I'll ever be able to scream as loud as it hurts."

"I know better than anyone how he feels-congruent lines with the same intersection of grief. Vanessa."

"The cord in my heart has been ripped out of the socket, and I can't stop living in the memory of a relationship that was broken any more than I can live in the memory of a person who isn't here."

"It feels like watching an avalanche form. I've done nothing to stop the growth of snow backed up in my heart. Nothing to stop the snowfall from accumulating. Now I'm staring at the drift as it tumbles at Mach speed, and I'm in a direct path of its chaos.

And it happens. I clutch my knees, tears pouring out of me like snow passing down the mountain. Pulling my emotion trees from their roots, dislodging the ways I've ignored all these feelings for so long. I sob, giant body-shuddering sobs."

"...Two tectonic plates sliding against one
another until his whole body shakes next to me. If only she could see the aftershock she left in us all."

These are stark examples of how an author can turn something so anguishing and bleak into a provoking story. Medema combines her morose reflectiveness with an impeccable formatting. The fact that this book progresses in a series of weeks seems such a minor detail, but it adds so much to the story in the name of the grieving process. In so many novels it's hard to sort out the timeline, so you wonder how the main character moved on so fast, but for Bailey the timeline in which she is engulfed in grief is clearly written out...That formatting adds an introspective aspect to Message Not Found that many novels surrounding grief don't touch on.

Layered with somber beauty and the unforgivingness of death, Message Not Found immediately found it's way into my heart. It is a searing exploration of love, loss, and the mysteries left behind. 

With so few months remaining in 2024, it will be hard to top something this evocative. This is the kind of book I can't even fathom the idea of disliking, so I refuse to look at any rating below a solid 5 stars.