A lot of teen books deal with suicide: either characters have suicidal feelings or they are dealing with the aftermath of the suicide of someone close to them. I just finished listening to I Was Here by Gayle Forman, which falls into the latter category.
Publisher’s Summary: When her best friend Meg drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything—so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg’s college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there’s a lot that Meg never told her. About her old roommates, the sort of people Cody never would have met in her dead-end small town in Washington. About Ben McAllister, the boy with a guitar and a sneer, who broke Meg’s heart. And about an encrypted computer file that Cody can’t open—until she does, and suddenly everything Cody thought she knew about her best friend’s death gets thrown into question.
It took me a while to warm up to Cody. She hasn’t had the soft life of some of Forman’s other protagonists. She is the only child of a single mother who is not very maternal, so has grown up tough and a bit prickly on the outside. She is, however, maybe more realistic that some of Forman’s other characters. because of her situation, there isn’t money for her to go away to school. She has to work after graduation and take classes at the local community college as she can afford them. Her dream of going to university in Seattle is a bust. But she’s making do. Meg’s suicide is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It turns her world upside down, but it eventually gives her the fortitude to take action.
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