A review by emanem
Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner

4.0

When I first started this book, I thought that I wished Carver's friends hadn't died. I know that sounds terrible but anyways. If you are reading this, I hope very much that you don't want this to make sense because I will guarantee it will not.

Carver thinks that he was the cause of his friend's car accident that killed all three of them. This is because he sent them a text while he knew they were driving. Then their car smashed into a stopped semi truck. Truth be told, his text probably was a factor in the crash.

My thoughts on this book were that some of it didn't need to be there and some of what needed to be there wasn't. I still gave this a 4 out of 5 starts though because I enjoyed . In the blurb, it says I probably didn't kill my best friends at least not on purpose and I didn't sneak out in the middle of the night and sever the brakes. That made me very confused because to me it felt like that was hinting that he did. But he didn't all he did was send a text. Next thing was that there were some parts that didn't sound like they would be the thoughts of a seven teen year old boy. Like these thoughts were very adult and mature and other times they were very childish.

At the beginning of the book Carver is trying to apply for collage and has to write an essay so throughout the book, he writes and rewrites that essay. But what I would like to know is that did he ever finish the essay? Because to me it just seemed like his world stopped at the end of the book. I would have liked an epilogue about if he got into collage and where and if he is still hurt by the accident and made new friends (which would show that people can heal from tragic losses).

I know that it was called goodbye days but it seemed like there was a little too much going on. Such as the fact that this seventeen year old kid is sad from the sudden loss of all his friends; is almost prosecuted for murder; has to hang out with all of his dead friend's family's; is getting into collage; getting panic attacks; and trying to figure out if he is allowed to like Eli's girlfriend (Eli was a friend who is now dead). One thing this book could have done without is the collage application essay or if the author had let us read what happened - like let us read the essay, and tell us how his future looks, like is Carver going to make friends again?