A review by jennifermreads
Before You Go by James Preller

1.0

Maybe I’m being influenced because I had just read an article in the local paper about being SICK of shows starting with an action scene that lasts three minutes then cutting to a screen that says “Four Days Earlier.” Flashbacks are getting old as narration vehicles. And this book started that way: a description of a car accident then flashback to the start of Jude’s summer working at the boardwalk in New York. The flashback shows Jude trying to move on with his life even as he is still having difficulty dealing with his little sister’s drowning six years earlier. The accident is briefly reprised on a single page 141 and then the remaining 58 pages are about Jude trying to move on from his best friend’s death. He never really recovers from either death – and there isn’t really any resolution or concrete clues on how someone also going through such an experience could deal with it themselves.

I was hoping this would be a reluctant-reader read but, given the topics, I cannot see recommending it to someone who is not eager to read! Even recommending it to a voracious reader would be difficult. The book is incredibly dark, choppy in its writing style, and lacks any sense of resolution or hope. I’m not sure what the author’s point was. Kirkus called the book “solid”??? Whatever … not sure that it is solid in anything. Booklist referred to its “moving drama of grief and guilt” and, again, I’m not sure that it movED much less was moving.