200 pages
After a series of failed suicide attempts, Daelyn
Rice is determined to get her death right. To her, life is unbearable. She’s
always been viciously bullied—even sexually harassed—due to her large size, and
her parents seem unconcerned about her pain. Now she really can’t deal, so she
starts visiting a website for “completers,” a site that encourages those who
have resolved to end their lives. Then, out of nowhere, a boy named Santana
begins to sit with her after school while she’s waiting to for her parents to
pick her up. She tries to make it clear that she has no interest in getting to
know him, but he won’t give up. Just when Daelyn finally got her plan together,
she begins to wonder if it’s too late to connect with someone and let him into
her world.
I really didn’t care for this book at all. Like Thirteen Reasons Why, I felt like the narrator was whiny and
overdramatic. I don’t mean to take suicide and depression lightly, but Daelyn’s
voice didn’t ring true to me as someone suffering from true depression. Yes,
she did have some terrible things happen to her. And I do admit that,
hopefully, kids will read something like this and realize that the way they
treat other people has consequences. Still, I just didn’t buy it. Daelyn’s
parents obviously cared about her, but she seemed to think no one in the world
would mind if she died. Perhaps she truly was clinically depressed, but if
that’s the case, there should have been more indication of those kind of
feelings as opposed to fixation in specific incidents. I found it difficult to
like Daelyn because she seemed to think only of herself—for instance, when she
finds out that another character has cancer, her first thought is that he’s
lucky because he’ll die soon. Granted, the things she’s been through are
responsible for some of that kind of thinking, but nevertheless it was hard for
me to care about the character when I only knew her as that kind of person. And
when I don’t care about the characters, I don’t care much for the book.
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