"You had a pile of rocks, and you cleaned them up pretty and make a necklace. Meg got jewels, and she hung herself with them." (Tricia Reynolds)
1)Mystery has always been my first love. It's the books that I've read ever since I could read and has always intrigued me.
2)I always like books that deal with life and death.
3)I'm always attracted to book that involve suicide or people who die and leaves clues about their death and what they left behind (morbid, but true).
4)I love books about people who find out who they are and what they want from life.
These are four things that I love when it comes to books. These are four things that I expected from I Was Here and to some extent, it did deliver.
Cody, is the main character and narrator of I Was Here. Her best friend, Meg commits suicide and she has to try to deal with it along with finding out unexpected things about Meg.
I liked Cody as a character. She had a no-nonsense attitude and I found her mean nature, anger and guilt over Meg's death understandable and utterly believable. Cody's relationship with her mother and the manner in which it develops - from indifference to love and understanding - was something that I loved. However, Cody's relationship with Meg and Ben were upsetting.
Meg commits suicide before the book starts. Cody and Meg are best friends and at one point Cody even calls Meg a sister, but I didn't feel that their friendship was epic. Cody doesn't know about Meg, who she was (especially when she was in college),what her life was like and didn't even bother to find out. Their friendship felt flat. Cody also talks about how Meg was amazing, charismatic, charming and special. But, because Meg died before the book, I wasn't able to meet her and understand what made her likable. Cody was basically telling me who Meg was, but I didn't get to see this personality for myself. This means that Meg's death and the aftermath of it, made no impression on me.
I also felt extreme hate towards Ben and Cody's problematic relationship.
First problem: Ben had a relationship with Meg. Don't even get me started on how wrong I found his relationship with Cody after that!
Second problem: Ben is a cliche' bad-boy. He smokes, sings in a band, is a player and douche-bag. Don't get me wrong? I love my bad boys, but they have to have a heart. Ben didn't have one!
Third problem: Every interaction between Cody and Ben had literally no sparks, no chemistry, NOTHING!
Fourth problem: Ben is willing to leave his bad-boy ways because of Cody. Oh please!
Final problem: How I felt about their relationship? I didn't even care about it!
But lets deal with the theme that this book revolves around, suicide. I wanted this book to show how Meg's suicide affects her family, her friends, her community and most importantly Cody and I Was Here succeeded in this. I wanted to gain new information about suicide from this book. I did and it was damn scary! The suicide support groups, the thoughts of Cody imagining Meg ending her life and the manner in which Cody kinda-falls into imagining suicide made me shudder. However, this book deals with committing suicide and while it's an important thing to deal with, this book provides methods and information about committing suicide that someone could potentially misuse. But, I really did feel that this theme was handled effectively.
This book disappointed me with many of the characterization aspects, but I really loved the way in which the theme of suicide was handled!
"Anything that kills hope is a sin." (Richard)