Some of the Parts
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Love Letters to the Dead and I’ll Give You the Sun comes a heartrending story of a teen who sets out on an unusual quest.
For months, Tallie McGovern has been coping with the death of her older brother the only way she knows how: by smiling bravely and pretending that she’s okay. She’s managed to fool her friends, her parents, and her teachers, yet she can’t even say his name out loud: “N—” is as far as she can go. Then Tallie comes across a letter in the mail, and it only takes two words to crack the careful façade she’s built up:
ORGAN DONOR.
Two words that had apparently been checked off on her brother’s driver’s license; two words that her parents knew about—and never revealed to her. All at once, everything Tallie thought she understood about her brother’s death feels like a lie. And although a part of her knows he’s gone forever, another part of her wonders if finding the letter might be a sign. That if she can just track down the people on the other end of those two words, it might somehow bring him back.
Hannah Barnaby’s deeply moving novel asks questions there are no easy answers to as it follows a family struggling to pick up the pieces, and a girl determined to find the brother she wasn’t ready to let go of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barnaby's elegant, well-paced novel stands out from others examining the death of a loved one both for its understated writing and for its penetrating exploration of the outer limits of grief and guilt. Sixteen-year-old Tallie is drowning in both emotions after her older brother, Nate, dies in a car accident that took place four months before the book opens. Tallie is both mourning his loss and trying to come to terms with being both "the one who survived" and the car's driver, as readers soon learn. When she discovers that Nate was an organ donor, she becomes obsessed with tracking down the recipients of his organs, and the novel takes on the feel of a detective story. Her unwilling accomplice is a new boy in town, Chase, who bears a heartbreaking resemblance to Nate and has his own fixation on other people's deaths. Barnaby (Wonder Show) beautifully brings Nate to life and movingly portrays the relationship between the siblings through Tallie's fragmented memories. A deeply affecting depiction of moving on after a great loss. Ages 12 up.
Customer Reviews
Loved it.
It was a very touching story about a teenage girl grieving over her brother, who passed away due to fatal injuries from a car accident.