Carver Briggs is a "seventeen-year-old funeral expert." After attending three consecutive services for his three best friends Mars, Eli and Blake, this may be the only thing he can say about himself anymore.
It's tragic enough that Carver's friends were killed in a driving-while-texting car accident, but Carver feels responsible for it: it was his text that Mars was responding to when the accident happened. ("Where are you guys? Text me back.") Consumed by guilt, the aspiring author from Nashville can no longer write: "Your writing only has the power to kill," he tells himself. Wracked with grief, terrified by the potential lawsuit against him and bewildered by his new closeness with Jesmyn, Eli's girlfriend ("Ex-girlfriend? They never broke up"), Carver is foundering: "I once thought heartbreak was akin to contracting a cold or becoming pregnant. It only comes one at a time. Once you get it, you can't get it again until you're done with the first round." But it turns out your "love heart, separate from your grieving heart, or your guilt heart, or your fear heart" can all be individually broken in their own way.
Carver's acute sensitivity drags him through each hellish day as he begins his senior year under the pall of friendlessness and blame. Eli's twin sister, Adair, cannot forgive him, nor can Mars's father, the formidable Judge Frederick Douglass Edwards, who sets in motion the criminal investigation into Carver's role in the accident. When Blake's grandmother asks Carver to take part in a "goodbye day" with her--one final chance to do all the things they imagine Blake might have wanted to do on his last day--a seed is planted. Although Blake, Eli and Mars come from three families who have reacted very differently to their respective sons' deaths, Carver begins to wonder if it wouldn't be helpful for each family to have a goodbye day to help them move forward.
In his gorgeous, devastating YA novel, Jeff Zentner (The Serpent King) explores the tormented inner life of a teenager in crisis. Although many will never experience tragedy on the scale Carver does, virtually everyone at some point goes through the kind of hardship that can drive a person deeply inward. With the help of a caring, funny therapist, memories of his sweet, smart and goofy friends, and Jesmyn, Carver struggles to find a way out of pure despair by recognizing that the living "still have to live." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: Seventeen-year-old Carver grapples with grief, guilt, fear and love in this exquisite and tragic YA novel by Jeff Zentner, author of The Serpent King.