Review: I Was Here

Title: I Was Here
Author: Gayle Forman
Publisher: Viking Juvenile
Release Date: January 27th 2015
Genre: Mystery-Thriller > Teen & Young Adult > Suicide Fiction
Add it: Goodreads
Buy it: Kindle Edition
Rating:

Blurb from Goodreads...

Cody and Meg were inseparable.
Two peas in a pod.
Until . . . they weren’t anymore.

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.

My Thoughts...

First off, let me admit my mistake in reading I Was Here by Gayle Forman... I expected it to be just like, if not more than, All The Bright Places by Jennifer Niven. I just expected too much! Which is my biggest mistake because I should know better than to compare books touted as the same by their publishers' PR people. Every book out there is uniquely written. Keep that in mind.

I Was Here is about Cody and Meg, best friends, inseparable. Everyone in their small town call them the Pod, as in two peas in a pod. They planned to get out of town and go to college together. But changes took place in their lives when Meg got a scholarship in college and Cody got left behind. Changes that Cody denied and ignored until Meg took her own life for no apparent reason. And when Meg's parents asked Cody to pack the former's stuff in her room in the college flat Meg shared with three other students, Cody realized that her best friend was someone she didn't really knew. She had a life of her own in college and even kept a big problem from her all along.

I know that these days, dark stories are "in" in the teen and young adult world. This novel certainly deals with it. Depression. Mental illness. Suicide. Something that we are all aware of but ignores most of the time. I definitely applaud authors who deal with these issues and incorporate ways on how deal with it. I love how so many young people can relate to dark stories like this and come out stronger, braver, ready to kill their demons after reading.

This particular novel, though, lacks something to me. I felt that Cody was not a really good central character. I didn't feel the connection with her. Her vague feelings toward Ben in the beginning was blah to me. To be fair, I do love so many other things in this book particularly the formation of friendships with Alice, Richard, and Henry. I love the change in Cody's relationship with her Mom, Trisha, in the end. Most of all, I love how the story was concluded.

All in all, I am recommending this book to those who love dark stories with good endings. A fair warning, though, DO NOT compare I Was Here with other books witht close to the same premise out there. Just read this one without any prejudices or expectations.

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Read in a few hours last February 6th overlapping towards the 7th.