This was one of those books that the more hyped up it got, the less I wanted to read it, oddly. It was just something I kept pushing further and further back on my tbr as I saw it blow it up, even if I can’t exactly pinpoint why exactly it put me off. I think it just seemed impossible for a book to live up to hype so high, and I wanted to let that die down a bit before I finally gave it a shot. And in the end, I’m actually glad I did! While I still enjoyed it overall and felt some scenes very strongly, it also just didn’t quite live up to the grand heights that I’d come to expect. Since I’d waited, I didn’t actually feel disappointed or let down in any way, which I might have otherwise if I’d read this much closer to release.

I think the main detractor for me was how long it took me to really get into the story and start feeling connected to it. In stories of such strong emotion, especially when that emotion comes from feeling with and for a character, it’s extremely important for me to have that connection quickly, so maximum emotional damage can be done to me. It just took me a really long time for me to feel like I was there, and that meant that really only the ending ended up hitting the hardest for me. However, it was an extremely strong final chapter, and ended bringing the rating back up a star for me! I really liked how everything was tied up, and seeing the tentatively hopeful culmination of 300 pages of grief.

While I did enjoy this quite a bit overall, there were a few detractors (that probably were part of the reason it took so long for me to feel connected to Julie/the story). One of the main things might have been the petty high school drama that was a background force in many scenes. It felt like it often took away a lot from the bigger picture of the story, and that there wasn’t room in the book for these petty squabbles, not when this big ball of grief was taking up so much space. It made the story feel a bit more cliché for me, even though I get that Julie is in high school and high schoolers can be so cruel. It just didn’t work for me, though I feel like it might’ve worked better if more attention was paid to it, since most of it just kinda disappears later on. I also felt like this with a lot of the side characters. So many of them were strong and had so much potential, but it felt like there just wasn’t space for them in the book. Julie was just going through so much, and there was such a big story there to tell, that there wasn’t much room left for all the side characters and making them feel more real and present. I also just didn’t like certain things done with one character, Tristan, which seemed like something might happen there that I was stressed about, only for nothing to ever come from it again?

In general, though, I really liked the look into grief that this story gave, especially how it focused on both learning to bring something with you even after they’re gone, but also showing how different people grieve differently (and how quickly people begin to shame people they think are grieving incorrectly). It just felt multi-layered in quite a few areas. I also liked how everything was shown to us, without forcing us to have a certain opinion on anything. We were able to see how Julie grieved, and how it was different from others, while also seeing how it hurt other people (genuinely, not just the people who tried to find someone to blame and used this to blame Julie). Even so, it didn’t feel like we were forced to pick sides. It felt like it was ok for both things to be true: Julie grieved differently and that’s ok, but it’s also true that that can sometimes hurt the people closest to you. The only thing that sometimes felt weird was how some characters reacted to Julie, especially in the beginning and middle of the book. Some adults gave Julie very little space to grieve, and some kids felt especially cruel, even for high schoolers. It was just a bit jarring sometimes, like when Julie’s teacher said it wasn’t fair to give her a further extension if he didn’t also give it to the rest of the class (like??? Not everyone in the class just lost their boyfriend of three years?). Overall, though, I did really like how grief was portrayed and explored in this book.

While this book isn’t necessarily the new favorite that I hoped it might be, I do still think it ended up worth the read. It’s a different portrayal of grief than we sometimes otherwise see in media, especially since it centers someone so young (who also lost someone so young). It’s overall just a good story of grief and loss, and I can see this being a good book for many!