My 5-star Slump – 215 days, 157 books
Meet Death. He goes by Travis at the moment and when he isn’t sitting beside people in their final moments he likes to wander or sit in his apartment restoring old photos. His life of peaceful detachment is interrupted when Layla, the little girl in the apartment across the hall, tries to befriend Travis.
It has been over seven months since my last real knock-your-socks-off new-favorite read (Yesteryear on December 2nd). For a variety of factors, probably more heavily influenced by my mental health and life circumstances than the quality of books I’ve been reading, this has been an immensely difficult reading year and honestly a pretty terrible year in general. So I had to start off this review by thanking Ben Reeves and Simon & Schuster and all of the people along that way that got this book into my hands and ended that damn slump. May it be the worst one I ever have. I’ll consider this by birthday present from the universe, seeing as I finished it on July 4th, my birthday is July 6th, and it’s being published on July 7th.
Okay, back to your regularly scheduled review:
This is a really sad book. I like sad books, but this one is a lot. Let me just say this now: If you don’t like sad books, do not read this.
It’s sad for a lot of reasons. It’s a book about Death, and there are some earth-shattering deaths in this book, but they are lovingly contrasted with incredible moments of life and joy. That dynamic is crucial to the emotional impact of the story, but those joyful moments are also in some cases some of the saddest moments of the book. In a way, you know the end of this story, because all stories end the same way if you follow them far enough. And yet, this story will catch you off guard over and over, because there’s more to these lives and deaths than the endings. Travis lives (?) in the world of the living, and thus he keeps company not with the dead but with the dying, the surviving, the grieving, and the ones left behind. In many cases, even when they’re not ready (which they never are) and they’re in scared and in pain (which they often are), the dead are the luckiest people in the book. It’s the people who have to persist in their absence, waiting for their own time to come who suffer the most.
Travis has no choice but to be the one who carries on. Even as he watches people grow up and mess up and succeed and lose and grieve, he will always be there for them in their final moments and he will always have to persist after they’re gone. Of course, you see him get close to Layla and Dalia and it’s a train wreck waiting to happen and he knows it too. Of course, you also see the joy and know that the love and pain wouldn’t matter so much if not for Travis.
I don’t really know how to talk about my personal feelings surrounding this book. I’ll tell you that I wasn’t bored or distracted for a second and I didn’t want it to end which was a pretty unfamiliar feeling these last few months. I can also tell you that, like many children with undiagnosed OCD, I was obsessed with death. Every time my mom went on a business trip, I would spend the week with my thoughts constantly interrupted by that voice telling me that she was definitely dead and someone would tell me the news any minute now and I would desperately try to remember what the last thing I said to her was because those would be our last words. She always came back, of course. When I was maybe 8 my grandmother died, but she had been very old my whole life and I wasn’t super close to her. I did realize though at that point that my dad was a lot older than the other kids’ dads, 50 years old when I was born. At 8 years old I did the math, figuring that if he lived to be my grandmother’s age, I wouldn’t be in my 50s or 60s when he died. I would be in my early-mid 30s. It terrified me then and it terrifies me now, even if I’ve gotten my death obsession more under control.
All of that to say, that we all have experiences with death whether you’ve lost people close to you or spent a lot of time anticipating it. In that sense, this book will connect with almost everyone in some way, even if it’s in a painful way that kind of makes you upset. The ending was very upsetting for me personally given my current circumstances. I can absorb that, but not everyone can, so once again I would say to really think over approaching this story. It has the potential to be incredibly touching and also quite damaging. For you, that might make it something you wouldn’t enjoy, but I think that makes it incredible and the best book I’ve read so far this year.
Thank you again to Ben Reeves and Avid Reader Press for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading (and take care of yourselves)!
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