Earlybird Review: I Was Here by Gayle Forman

Title: I Was Here
Author: Gayle Forman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (Australia)
Publication date: January 29th, 2015
Genre: Young adult, Contemporary, Romance, Suicide, Realistic fiction

Synopsis:
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.

I Was Here is Gayle Forman at her finest, a taut, emotional, and ultimately redemptive story about redefining the meaning of family and finding a way to move forward even in the face of unspeakable loss.

(This review is going to be spoiler free so I'm not going to go into too much detail about secondary characters, love interest or major plot points, etc.)

Both the If I Stay and Just One Day duologies are absolutely incredible so it should come as no surprise that Gayle Forman's newest novel is too. I Was Here is the perfect combination of everything a novel needs to be: heartbreakingly beautiful, effortlessly witty, swoony, slow burning and genuine.


I was instantly intrigued by the premise of this novel upon reading the blurb several months ago. Exploring suicide in a young adult novel is a tricky thing to do, but I had faith that Gayle Forman would pull it off phenomenally. And she did.

Suicide in YA has become quite a cliché, but I Was Here delivered a refreshing and distinct voice through it's protagonist, Cody. Cody is the protagonist that every author wants to write, incredibly genuine, well-rounded, with a unique outlook and a mentality that perfectly mirrors that of a seventeen year old girl. (I would know, I just so happen to be a seventeen year old girl.) She doesn't have a perfect life. She cleans houses for a living and lives with her single mother, Tricia.

The wonderful thing about this is that Cody's struggles are genuine issues that plague teenage girls, such as confidence and struggling to find their identity. But the novel explores much darker themes and is a stark contrast to Forman's previous novels. Themes such as suicide, depression, and broken homes are portrayed in an utterly realistic light.

Cody lost her best friend in the entire world whom she thought she knew everything about. But she didn't, and as she finds out that there was more to Meg's life then what she thought, she does what I think any other teenager in that situation would have done: embarked on a journey to find out what went wrong in her best friend's life. But Cody is racked with guilt for having not noticed that Meg was suffering from depression, and she refuses to believe that Meg decided to commit suicide all on her own, she needs somebody to blame. Every single one of Cody's actions or thoughts was incredibly realistic to what I feel I would do if put in a similar situation, it's human nature to want to find someone to blame. It's not so often that we get to see such an authentic mentality in a protagonist.

The memory of Meg that Forman created was brilliant. We never actually get to meet Meg but the way she is portrayed through stories and memories feels exactly how it should, like the ghost of her. As though someone had taken the coffee mug away but a ring remained. A subtle reminder of what once was.

My only qualm is that the plot itself started of quite slowly, but I think that the meditative pace helped to reinforce Meg's impact. It's not easy to move on after losing someone, so naturally it took Cody a while to spring into action. Meg was such a large part of Cody's world. As Cody said herself: "And now I don't know how to be anymore. If there's even a me without her. It's like she was my sun, and then my sun went out."


Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I cried but the entire time I could not stop turning the pages. I Was Here is a phenomenal novel by the goddess that is Gayle Forman. Forman delivers yet another absolutely heartbreakingly beautiful tale that explores more intense and honest themes than the common contemporary novel. It's contemplative, more than a little bit melancholy and absolutely incredible.

Without a doubt: 5 out of 5. Gayle Forman is a goddess.

PRE-ORDER I WAS HERE:

Amazon  -  iTunes  -  Barnes and Noble

I Was Here hits shelves from the 27th of January (US) and February 1st (AUS)