his is the third book I’ve read this week that had a drowning in it. This is another story where the sibling feels the drowning is his fault and where the parents deal with grief in different ways. Jude’s dad jogs to try to forget and his mom self-medicates. At the end of the school year Jude gets a job and meets Becca. She is easy to talk to and so he shares his grief with her. Then he is hit with another tragedy when he loses a close friend in a car accident. Once again this is a story about dealing with grief. So many times people shut themselves up to grief. This story is divided into two parts: Before and After. I felt like the second half was better, stronger than the first half. Would I recommend this to my students? You bet. Can they get it from my shelves? No. This is another one that had to be pulled due to district guidelines. I still recommend it. ( )

MEH. ( )

The summer before his senior year, Jude (yes, he's named after the Beatles song) gets his first job, falls in love for the first time, and starts to break away from his parents. Jude's house is kept dark, and no one talks much—it's been that way since his little sister drowned in a swimming pool seven years ago when Jude was supposed to be watching her.
Now, Jude is finally, finally starting to live. Really live. And then, life spins out of control. Again.
Acclaimed author James Preller explores life, death, love, faith, and resilience in his first young adult novel that will grip readers from the book's dramatic first few pages to its emotional end.

Real and absorbing with well developed characters and a vivid setting. ( )

The kind of book where you know what's coming from the first page (seriously, the prologue tells of a car crash in which a teen dies and two others are injured) and spend the next 100 pages hoping it won't really happen. The first half (or so) is about friendship and relationships and family; the second part is grief and loss and still friendship. A reasonably strong story for boys (and I'll be passing it along to the high school librarian, who was recently looking for fiction dealing with the death of a teen boy who wasn't the MC's boyfriend), though the writing is sometimes flat and out-of-touch-seeming. OTOH, a lot of the slang and some of the weird things characters say, the things they find funny, really do ring true to me as someone who grew up on Long Island, so there's that. ( )