The Last Time We Say Goodbye by Cynthia Hand Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“This is going to sound trite, I suppose, but you never know when it’s going to be the last time. That you hug someone. That you kiss. That you say goodbye.”- The Last Time We Say Goodbye, Cynthia Hand

There's death all around us.
We just don't pay attention.
Until we do.

The last time Lex was happy, it was before. When she had a family that was whole. A boyfriend she loved. Friends who didn't look at her like she might break down at any moment.

Now she's just the girl whose brother killed himself. And it feels like that's all she'll ever be.

As Lex starts to put her life back together, she tries to block out what happened the night Tyler died. But there's a secret she hasn't told anyone-a text Tyler sent, that could have changed everything.

Lex's brother is gone. But Lex is about to discover that a ghost doesn't have to be real to keep you from moving on.

I don't know why I decided to read this book now, except I was looking for something to read at the library and finally bit the bullet and added All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven to the stack of books I was going to check out. So I got this one, too, because I have a tendency to read multiple books surrounding the same theme/subject at the same time, probably because I like to compartmentalize things like books so much.

Interestingly, I thought I would like this book more than All the Bright Places, given that it seemed to be a more serious/less fluffy attempt at tackling the heavy suicide/grief narrative. I mean, I started reading All the Bright Places, and I'm not a fan so far, but I didn't like this one nearly as much as I thought I would.

For starters, I hated Lex. She is the type of main character I can't stand- an overly rational, math and universe obsessed girl who constantly spouts off about the universe and how perfect numbers are and blah blah blah. I just can't relate to characters like that at all. Also, I'm just really sick of all these extremely intelligent main characters. Like, it seems like every main character in every YA novel I've read in recent memory is a genius who of course is going to every smart school know to man and gets into all of them.

Also, did you notice that all these mental illness/death books are the same, in recent memory at least? They all follow these ultra rational teens with strong pretentious streaks who go on and on about the universe and believe they're philosophers because they can recycle some canned quotes by astronomers. Is that really what teens want nowadays? 

But one of the reasons why I even thought this book would be better than All the Bright Places was because I noticed the author had a deep connection to suicide- the death of her brother, to be exact. Which was why I was so disappointed that this book seemed like every other YA grief book I ever read. The family dynamics were typical- cheating dad the scumbag who left the family for a woman half his age, mom the wonderful human being he left behind, and then a fairly typical (for YA novels, at least) sibling relationship with the brother and sister. Just an aside, why do divorced couples in YA novels always have to do with one partner (usually always the father) cheating? And why is the father always the one demonized? I feel bad for YA fathers. If they aren't assholes then they're dead; it's like the reverse of the Disney tendency to kill off mothers. I wonder if a lot of authors must suffer from daddy issues on pare with Sylvia Plath's. And the mother is always the wonderful saint who is a victim of the father's actions, of course. Please tell me someone else is as frustrated by this as I am.

I don't think this book told me anything different about grief either. I didn't underline anything or write any notes about how insightful certain points are. It seemed like Hand wanted to showcase how mourning a suicide is different from mourning a natural causes/accidental death, and there were glimmers of that in the text, but I would have dealt more with the anger surrounding his death. Instead of going with the generic ghost approach, I would have focused primarily on feelings like blaming him for the pain he caused to the family with his death, or feeling unable to mourn him because his death was his decision. Those are uncomfortable thoughts and emotions to deal with, and likely would have generated a ton of Goodreads reviews talking about how toxic that was for a person on the edge, but it would have been ultimately a very real approach, and one that many readers who have lost loved ones to suicide likely could relate too, especially given that it has become so taboo to even think about feeling that way towards a suicide.

Because most of my problems with this book relied on the fact that I had a hard time feeling her pain. I felt like I had read those same emotions surrounding a death- being mad that her brother's friends seemingly had moved on, frustrated by the lack of acknowledgment about her brother's death, all those things are typical in the grief subgenre in contemporary. Which all sounds so horrible, but it's the truth. That being said, I thought her mother was done quite well at depicting a woman whose heart was likely torn to pieces, and I wished her father was more fleshed out. For some reason, the grief of fathers are rarely touched upon, or when they are it seems that most authors don't really know how to depict their grief. With mothers it's easier- often, they mourn openly and aren't afraid to talk about how they feel, to the point where most child grief blogs are written by women. Fathers are more shut in, though they do grieve just as deeply, which is probably why authors rarely show them at a funeral or seem to skip past them. 

Before I wrap this up I'll mention a few little things that bugged me. Like the fact that I can't stand when one character lectures another about smoking. That's probably another reason why I hated Lex. Like, Jesus, that lecture she gave to the boys is something a mom would say, not a fourteen year old girl. Disclaimer: I don't smoke. But I have no problem with someone else smoking as long as they don't make me do it. You want to trash your lungs, go right ahead. I mean, I wouldn't support them by buying smokes for them, but if they want to waste their own money, I don't particularly care. But people who lecture others about stuff like that and they aren't their doctor make me want to buy an entire pack of smokes, shove them all in my mouth at once, and light up. This may be juvenile, but it's the truth. 

My other thing is that I believe that Patrick and Damian should have been taken out. And I liked Damian. But Patrick's death was treated horribly, as well as Damian's "attempt". Both felt like they were remnants of an earlier draft, one with perhaps a suicide pact as the main issue. I don't know. What I do know is that they should have either been treated better, or taken out completely. 

Despite all my complaining, I didn't actually hate this book and thought some parts were quite well done- like the writing- but I wished others matched up. I would recommend this book as a book that I'm sure the target audience of teenagers would love, and if it does in fact help someone with their grief, hey, all the more power to it. For me, it just seemed like every other book dealing with a similar topic. What a shame.

5 out of 10