Before I Die

I stayed up reading this book because I just couldn't put it down. I have since re-read it many times, and it's one of my favorites. Very emotional.

This is one of the best books I have read in my life. When I read this book, I wasn't expecting it to affect me so much and to strike me on such a personal and emotional level. The last pages absolutely make the book. This book has stayed with me for months and months, I still can't get over it. I recommend this book to everyone, along with lots and lots of tissues. "Before I Die" is absolutely phenomenal.

Nearly a perfect debut novel. This book is worthy of every bit of praise it has received. Its few flaws are easily forgiven. My only disappointment was the familiarity of the Shawshank-Redemption-like "get busy living/get busy dying" callout the book designer put on the back cover, but I have to admit that in context it makes perfect, perfect sense. The author effectively expresses the near-meaninglessness of sex as a mere physical activity, and the entirely opposite experience of love expressed in a physically intimate relationship. These are just two of the things on Tessa's list. She's easy to believe, and by the time you're into this book a little way, you'll care about her and what she decides to do.

We know three pages into "Before I Die" that sixteen-year-old Tessa won't survive her leukemia--and that there's plenty she still wants from life. So she makes a list and vows to do everything on it before she dies. Like most teenagers, Tessa is at odds with her parents and angsty about how life's shortchanged her. At first her ranting and left-field demands seem too adolescent. Isn't the looming presence of death supposed to mature her beyond her years? But that's precisely the kind of "dying-young" trope that Downham admirably resists throughout the novel. Tessa burns up a maddening number of days moping when we think she should be fulfilling her dreams. She finally pushes herself to face facts: "I have two choices--stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living." Downham escapes the common shortcoming of many young adult novels in which the only character that ever really matters to us is the speaker. In this novel, Tessa's relationships are so dynamic that we ache with her at the thought of losing them. Throughout the book, their interactions thrum with tension and tenderness. There's Cal, the tactless younger brother who helpfully explains the process of decomposition. And Zoe, the careless best friend who has her own troubles to wake her up to life. There's Dad in denial, determined to save Tessa through organic foods and fierce hugs. Mom, who cut out about the time of Tessa's diagnosis and who remains slightly outside of the helping circle (without becoming a monster). And there's Adam, the blessing of love and vulnerability that lands next door to Tessa at the crucial time. And where a lesser writer might swill us readers around in dying-girl thought soup, Downham lets the telling detail speak for Tessa's feelings instead. Her anger comes to us through her as she gives herself points for the imagined deaths of healthy strangers: "One point for the lump on her neck, raw and pink as a crab's claw." We feel her hunger for life as she licks an ice-cream stick until "the wood rasps my tongue." We know her true well-wishes for those she loves as she dreams up a replacement for her boyfriend, a "girl with lovely curves and breath like oranges." There's nothing treacly here. It's a brave, humanist novel, one that leaves the reader gulping the polluted, precious air of Tessa's world with a passion and astonishment almost as great as Tessa's. Downham earns for us the catharsis of the ending, for her characters come to take up real space in our hearts. Up until the last word, I think, we hope that Tessa will somehow, against all odds, keep breathing. When she doesn't, we mourn for Tessa just as she wished: by remembering her.

I admire so many things about this book: the bravery it took to write so unflinchingly about death; the character of Tessa, who is so wonderfully imperfect in her desires and actions; and the ferocious love of life that shouts and sings on every page. This is truly a book about living that makes you want to never have another numb moment.

Jenny Downham could not have known the effect her simple and sparse words could have on the unsuspecting reader. In a style not unlike Tove Jansson("The Summer Book"-a good start), Ms.Downham says so much without need of superfluous word waste. This book enraptured me and took my breath away. Indeed I longed to give Tessa the breaths I realized I was wasting and had to shake myself to remember Tessa isn't real. Ms.Downham ushers in so many issues of teenage reality with such acceptance that I reeled with trying to understand how my young daughter will soon enough face her choices. Young adults would, I believe, be able to accept this adult's version of their concerns as accurate and inspirational. And then there is the cancer. I would give this book to anyone facing disease threatened mortality. Tessa completely disproves Mr. Twain's utterances on "youth being wasted on the young" and reminds us all that life should not be wasted on the living. Though I still feel in mourning for Tessa, sympathy for her friends and family, I am inspired to anticipate Jenny Downham's next story with the assurance of reading a fantastic novel. Write on Ms. Downham!