After by Kristen Harmel
Title: After by Kristin Harmel
Pages: 240
Rating: 4/5
Genre: YA Lit
Summary (Off Goodreads): LACEY’S WORLD SHATTERS when her dad is killed in a car accident. And secretly? She feels like it’s her fault. If she hadn’t taken her own sweet time getting ready that morning . . . well, it never would have happened. Her mom wouldn’t be a basket case. Her brother Logan wouldn’t drink. And her little brother would still have two parents.
But life goes on even if you don’t want it to. And when Lacey gets the chance to make a difference in the lives of some people at school, she jumps at it. Making lemonade out of lemons is her specialty. Except she didn’t count on meeting a guy like Sam. Or that sometimes? Lemonade can be a pretty bitter drink to swallow.
Review: This is the third book that I've won off Goodreads and it is easily the best. It deals with a sixteen year old girl and her grief. It also deals with her family and how her entire world changes when her father is killed. I think Harmel did a very good job with describing the events of this young girl's life without going over the top.
Lacey's reaction to her father's death is that it was her fault. She believes that she was the reason for his death, mainly because she dragged her feet the morning it happened. She seems to deal with her grief by taking on every responsibility. Her family is falling apart around her and she constantly feels the need to fix things. I felt like she was trying to fix everything in the hope that it would make up for the one thing she couldn't fix.
Lacey also couldn't seem to drum up sympathy for anyone around her. Her best friend, Jennica, had parents who had just gone through a divorce. All Lacey could think was that at least they were still alive and, despite being such good friends with her, couldn't really see how it was worse than what Lacey herself was going through. It wasn't until Jennica's father remarried, and decided not to invite his two daughters to his wedding, that Lacey started to understand that just because your parent didn't die didn't mean you couldn't lose them.
Sam was the love interest of the story and was actually one part of the story that I didn't enjoy. His arrival seemed too well-placed. He moved into Lacey's school about ten months after Lacey's father died and plays the part of the understanding comforter and friend who has also lost a parent. He seemed to be everything she needed and, of course, Lacey, who had been closed off to everyone since her father died, opened up to Sam. Then, predictably, he betrayed her. However, to Harmel's credit, it was not in a way I thought. Harmel had Sam tell Lacey the ever ominous "I have something to tell you" line, which always ends up being something bad. I was betting on Sam being sick. Then Sam disappears for five days and Lacey finally talks to his aunt. It turns out that Sam's father isn't really dead; he was just in a coma and had woken up.
Lacey had started a group that consists of kids her age who have lost a parent, including her older brother. It isn't really a grief group; they've all been through that and couldn't stand it. It was just a group of people to hang out with who understood and weren't going to treat you differently. For the first time people weren't staring at them, weren't giving them sympathetic looks and they knew that the other people weren't befriending them for the sole reason that they had just lost a parent. It was a group of kids that finally started to feel normal again, if only for a few hours. Sam joined the group, not realizing at first that it was a group for kids whose parents had died, no just people who felt that they had lost them. When Lacey learns that, not only did he never clear up the misunderstanding, but now his father is awake and Same has gotten his second chance, she refuses to talk to him, feeling betrayed, and reasonably so. It wasn't quite the surprise I expected which counteracted the formulaic feeling I was starting to get in terms of the romance.
Lacey's family is also a mess. Her mother spends almost all of her time working, never really helping her kids in the way that they need it. She wasn't dealing with the situation so she couldn't really help her kids deal with it. Lacey's younger brother, Tanner, all but stopped speaking. If he said a sentence a day it was a big deal. He completely retreated into himself and even stopped hanging out with his friends. You find out later it's because he thinks that it wasn't right for him to feel happy, to be happy, now that his dad was gone. Lacey's older brother, Logan, started drinking heavily. Lacey's way of coping was trying to hold her family together. I liked the different reactions Harmel presented her readers with. No two people dealt with their grief in the same way. Lacey continually insisted that she was fine when it was obvious to everyone that she wasn't fine.
One of my favorite scenes in the book was when Lacey went to her father's grave on the one year anniversary of his death. She had been there earlier with her mother and younger brother but was once again taking care of her family. Later that evening, she went out running and ran to the cemetery. She starts talking to her father's headstone apologizing for everything: how she dragged her feet that fateful morning, how she should have said something when she saw the SUV coming, how she should have looked up sooner, and finally, that it wasn't her, that she wasn't the one that was hit. It was such an emotional and moving moment and Lacey finally confronted all of the things that she had been avoiding for a year. She finally admits that she was angry at him. She was angry at her father for leaving and not caring enough to stay.
When she leaves the cemetery, Sam is standing there, ready to support her and Lacey finally forgives him, realizing that just because people's parents haven't died doesn't mean that she should shut them out of her life.
The only other thing about the book that I didn't like was that, at the end, Logan ends up in the hospital after drinking and hitting a telephone pole with a car. He ends up being ok but suddenly, all the problems the family was seeming to have disappeared. Lacey's mother started to take an interest in her family again, Logan went to rehab, Tanner found a friend, the younger sister of one of the kids in Lacey's group, and started talking again. I don't mind things fixing themselves, because eventually things usually do fix themselves. It's never easy and it's never quick but it happens. I just think Harmel did it a little too quickly. Everything was wrapped up into a neat little bow and everyone was happy again. Not that it wouldn't happen, I just think that it would take more time than that.
Overall, I was impressed with the book. I love YA lit anyway and Harmel really presents us a tragic yet wonderful story. I was a little unsure of this book because often books that deal with grief don't execute well. However, I really feel like Harmel managed to show you how differently everyone reacts to things and not just to death.
Books this year: 5/75
Currently Reading: The Life of Elizabeth I by Allison Weir (still. I'm about halfway through but it's thick reading so I took a break with this book.)
As always, you can read this review and all others at my Goodreads account and my journal, im_writing .