For instance, she hopes to meet Zoey’s baby. Over the course of the novel, Tessa’s list of goals changes. Zoey ultimately decides to keep the baby, changing from a wild and frivolous teenager to a serene expectant mother. Zoey’s pregnancy estranges her from her own family, but also focuses and settles her. Meanwhile, her best friend Zoey has paired off with Jake’s friend and roommate Scott, a short-lived romance that results in Zoey getting pregnant. Her first time having sex, with a local boy named Jake whom she meets in a nightclub, is a disappointment, and she is later humiliated when she learns that Jake knows about her illness. Nevertheless, Tessa’s plans are complicated by the needs of her family and friends, and by her own illness. She keeps the list in her bedside drawer so that her father will not see it. Tessa’s list of things she’d like to do before death is her way of behaving like a typical rebellious teenager despite her illness. A book that will make you happy to be alive.Tessa lives with her patient and devoted father and her younger brother Cal her mother, who left the family when Tessa was twelve, lives in a separate apartment. It's a novel that won't fail to touch those who read it, and despite the melancholy subject matter it manages to be hugely life-affirming. A book that will make you happy to be alive. For everyone, it is a reminder to value the people that matter, seize the moment, wish with courage, adventure with relish, even if it's just a trip to the swimming pool, drinking hot chocolate or driving down a dual carriageway in the rain Guardian It deals with death, but it's a hymn to life The Irish Times It's about love and friendship and family.
I defy anyone not to cry reading this book Daily Expressĭownham's prose is brave and bare, her characters relentlessly realistic Sunday Telegraph Tough but tender, angry rather than resigned, Tessa is an appealing heroine whose company is never less than bracing IndependentĪ work of great humanity and profound empathy. Writing about dying children can sometimes seem too easy a target for instant emotion but always does much better than that Independentĭestined to drive hundreds of thousands of readers to tears and to swift injunctions to all their friends to read it Observer Jenny Downham's extraordinary first novel does both The Sunday Timesīefore I Die is so real, so sad, so true - and I so wish I'd written it myself Jacqueline Wilson But most books for teenagers will not leave an adult reader's eyes so blurry with tears that it's hard to see the final chapters. Novels for young teenagers do not usually feature drugs and casual sex within the first 20-odd pages.
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