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| ★★★✰✰ |
Synopsis: Tessa has just a few months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is sex. Released from the constraints of 'normal' life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa's feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa's time finally runs out.
***
Review: This novel is described on the back cover as being 'life-affirming, uplifting, joyous.' I'm not sure who described it as such, but they weren't reading the same book as me. A lot about the book points to the author's being in possession of some degree of talent - the general structuring of the book, the easy readability and quite often the use of language. It's the sort of novel that will leave you scribbing down quotes for future reference, because the author really does display a certain way with words. The structuring of the ending is absolutely superb, and reading the 300 pages prior to it is almost worth it just to get caught up in how the end is portrayed. Unfortunately however, the novel suffers from a distinct lack of character depth. In some parts, it also lacks serious credibility. These are pretty major problems for a book that's trying to be heart-wrenching about a dying girl.
The main character, 16-year-old Tessa, is already suffering from something that the vast majority of readers aren't going to be able to relate to - terminal illness. So the trick with Tessa is to portray a girl who is in every other way possible to relate to, so that the reader can to some degree join in her suffering and mourn her loss. That's not really what happens, however. Tessa has serious moodswings (understandably, though not necessarily relatably) and generally ends up wishing the worst on everybody around her at some point. It's very difficult to feel sympathy for a hateful person, even when they're dying. But beyond that, Tessa never really seems to develop a personality of her own. Yes, the language used in much of the novel seems beautiful, but it never seems to be coming from a sixteen-year-old girl, so it's difficult to attribute it to her. The novel also notes on it's back cover that, 'sometimes the most unexpected things become important.' Yeah, when you can't out of your bed, and realise 'oh fuck I'm really going to die.' It's hard to like a person whose death has to be pretty much upon them for them to realise what actually matters in life - most people figure it out a bit sooner.
The next best thing would have been to create secondary characters so loveable that even if the reader doesn't mourn Tessa's passing, that they would feel a degree of sympathy for the loss suffered by her family and friends. This doesn't really happen either. The characters all seem abstract, incomplete. They seem to have no real personality, and serve only to move the plot forward. Tessa's relationship with Adam seems completely unlikely and unbelieveable, we don't get a real sense of the difficulty the father has, the awkwardness of the mum, or any kind of comprehension from the little brother that his big sister is dying. In the end, what becomes saddening about the whole affair is not WHO is dying or WHO is being left behind, but rather that anybody is dying at all. So while the novel is readable, flowery in places and has a successful ending, it's not the sort of thing I would recommend to anybody to run out and buy - give it a glance if you've a few hours to spare.
Rating: 3/5
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