Review: I Was Here by Gayle Forman

Book: I Was Here
Author: Gayle Forman
Publisher: Viking: Penguin
Pages: 270

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.

3/5 stars

Non spoilery review:

Here is the review, as promised, but I was hoping it would be on a better note. Honestly, this book just wasn't for me. I went into it excited and ready for some more Gayle Forman amazingness, but it just seemed to miss the mark.

So you have Cody: the girl with the absent father who loves to read, Meg: Cody's quirky best friend who doesn't quite fit in in their small town and who commits suicide, and Ben: the rocker womanizer. I found the characters pretty cliche, but that doesn't mean they weren't well written. Gayle Forman's writing really seemed to bring Cody and Ben, and yes even Meg, to life but their characteristics were just a bit too cookie cutter for me. We've seen these same characters in a thousand different stories before, just with different names.

The plot was decent, but  it was rather predictable. I kept waiting for an amazing plot twist or at least something that would deviate from where I thought it was going to go, but meh. The pace of the book is quite slow, which reflects how Cody is feeling, but it was just too slow for me. I usually am a pretty fast reader but  it took me forever to get through this book.

But I did like parts of this book a lot! The relationships between the characters developed so much, especially between Cody and Tricia. But I won't get too much into character development because spoilers.

Oh my gosh I LOVE the writing in this book! I swear, Gayle Forman could make legal documents sound beautiful. Whenever I felt bored with the plot, the writing kept me reading. It's so gorgeous.

I thought that suicide was extremely well done in this book. It is an extremely heavy subject for anyone to even begin to discuss, but Gayle tackles it well.

I encourage people to pick this book up even if it wasn't for me. However, I wouldn't recommend making it your first Gayle Forman book.

(I won't be doing a spoilery review because I don't have a ton to talk about and it just came out)

Happy reading!
~Kera