Hello friends and happy Friday! The end of another week! Today I’m going to be posting my review of Jeff Zentner’s novel Goodbye Days.

Goodbye Days by: Jeff Zentner: One text can change your life. After sending a text to one of his best friends, Carver discovers that his three best friends, Mars, Eli and Blake, have been killed in a car crash. Left to live with the guilt inside of him, he must try to continue living; only that’s easier said than done. When Blake’s grandma suggests a goodbye day, doing everything Blake would have loved one last time in remembrance, soon the other families start to ask Carver to do this too. This was a heavily emotional novel that really took grief head on. Zentner did a really good job of showing the different forms that grief can take on and exploring how people will experience it differently. He really described how a best friend will experience grief differently than a sibling or a parent; it was really well written and thought out. The story, as sad as it was, was also really beautiful and showed the meaning of life; that what we do matters, even the small things. The plot was fast-paced and the reader found themselves wanting to read more to find out how Carver was because they felt for him. He was a very likeable character who was developed; the reader didn’t always agree with him or his choices, but they felt so real, human and that of a teenager. The secondary characters really supported him and also gave room for the story to blossom into what it became. Even though we didn’t actually get to meet Carver’s best friends, we got to know them really well through Carver as he talked and remembered them, which made for wonderful storytelling. This novel hits hard, but also leaves room for happiness and growth.