Before I Die

[Flingo]

Before I Die - Jenny Downham

Tessa has just a few months to live…

Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is sex.

Released from the constraints of 'normal' life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up.

Tessa's feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa's time finally runs out.

BEFORE I DIE is a brilliantly-crafted novel, heartbreaking yet astonishingly life-affirming. It will take you to the very edge.
I came to this book thinking I was going to love it.

Although it's a cliched plot, all the reviews I read hyped it up, and I figured it would be like a "Jodi Picult-esque" take on a controversial issue. Unfortunately, it didn't quite achieve that. Tessa's list was predictable, and it was easy to guess where the plot twists were going to be.

I admit the writing felt to be a cut above other similar offerings, and Downham did succeed in making me feel for the characters and make me think about how I might feel in Tessa's situation.

While the below isn't entirely a plot spoiler, please don't read it if you want to / are going to read the book!

I will also admit that I cried towards the end, as I read the letters Tessa had written for her family to read after her death.

I also found the use of white spaces in the final chapters really evocative. as Tessa drifts in and out of consciousness

Overall, I feel very mixed about the whole book - I enjoyed it, but wasn't wowed in the way I hoped I would be. I engaged with the characters, and yes, I felt for them, but I don't really think I would have wanted any of them to be real people in my life! I've given it 4*s because it could have been worse and it was highly compelling and readable, but it didn't quite have the x factor for 5. However, on another day I may have only been tempted to give it 3 for it's plotting and predictability! Mixed feelings indeed.

[Hazel]

Flingo warned me that I would need tissues for this book and she was wrong. I eventually needed my duvet, my pillow and my hubby's pillow. Last night, I could not stop crying at this book and this morning my eyes are all puffy and I look like a lizard.

Tessa has a few months to live, as she has terminal cancer. So as a teenage girl probably would she writes a list of things she would like to do before she dies and it predictably includes having sex, drugs, travel, and curiously saying yes to everything for one day. So we are presented with Tessa's part-narration part-inner monologue as she struggles with cancer treatments, getting her list completed and coming to terms with her death. She's in a kind of limbo; busy living and busy dying. Meanwhile her best friend is also going through a life changing experience which makes Tessa feel she isn't there for her.

Flingo is right that it is all fairly predictable stuff, nothing earth-shattering here. But there are a few events that really go for the reader's heart. Tessa's letters to her family, the way the narrative fractures as Tessa dies, and in particular for me Adam painting her name all over the town.

I have to give it 4 stars despite the predictableness of the plot, because I literally could not stop crying, I really struggled to get to the end as the words swam before my eyes, and I was utterly gripped by the book. I had only read about a quarter up till last night, and then I just ploughed through it.

I would also add that this book is really for older teenagers as there are some descriptions of sex that are a little too graphic and adult for younger teenagers.

[Colyngbourne]

There are few spoilers needed for a book called Before I Die, few warnings either that you’re going to slowly become immured by the text until with the inevitable ending, you are choked by tears. Inevitable because the narrator is certainly on the last stages of her life’s journey and is meticulously planning what can and can’t be managed within the last limits of her days: a ticky list of experiences (drugs, driving, sex are the predictable ones at the outset), not least of which is “falling in love”. This list is both the most artificial and most authentic engine for the action in the book and never fails until 16 yr old Tessa leaves the pages.

The narration, as first-person, forces us up close with Tessa, breathing alongside her (even for her, at times), immersed in her head and alongside her incredibly adult thinking. Arguably this could be where some readers might find the credibility wanes – Tessa seems able to express some of the truths that are barely graspable in seventy or eighty years of life, and with a readiness that still struggles to understand more, know more, experience more.

The narrative voice is certainly that of a young woman but as the balance of life tips, the dispossession of it invites a counterpoint of self-possession in the narration. The words and spaces on the page become more spare and also more telling in the closing chapters, Tessa’ voice more distinctive and sharpened, but also less like herself as she sheds the world. Yet somehow we are kept emotionally connected throughout the slow disintegration of connections in Tessa’s life and body. Throughout Tessa searches for and finds life and death in miniscule – her best friend’s pregnancy, the arrival of winter, old holiday graffiti which has been painted over – and senses the full vibrancy and energy of life, tasting it herself. Rather predictably for these times, there is no mention of God or the afterlife, other than in a brief exchange with a nurse and references to the yawning emptiness of the cosmos – it is the life lived here and now that is being relayed, and that is where its truth can be found: in the friendships and loves Tessa has amongst her family and friends, the in-loved-ness too.

This is a tremendous book for any teenager to read (and any adult too): it is not sentimental or schmaltzy, not overburdened with words or explanations or introspection (which when it comes, comes in slivers that are not too laced with poignancy). It was well worth the rush into publication that made David Fickling contract two years into six months of editing and promotion.

*****

[Minxminnie]

I've just finished this, and my reaction was more like Flingo's than Hazel's - I didn't find it emotionally overwhelming, but this is maybe just as well as I forgot Hazel's advice (on another thread) and read the end in a cafe!
I wonder if its emotional impact would be greater if you have kids of your own: I don't, so I'm sure there's a dimension that is lost on me. I imagine the dad's situation is fairly well handled - I liked the way that Tess was a realistic teenager and overlooked the impact her behaviour had on her dad, who had to shoulder all of the caring.
I also liked the matter of fact way that the medical aspects were dealt with - no melodrama and over-sentimentalisation.
I would encourage teenagers to read this book (older ones, maybe over sixteen due to the sexual content) because it might encourage them to value what they have a bit more.

[Adrian]

I'll say one thing for BGO: it gets me reading books that wouldn't otherwise have come to my attention...

A first-person narrative where you know the narrator has a terminal disease can only end one way: with said narrator describing their own death. Not very original and totally unbelievable, but told very well in this book. However, the further I got through this, the more I felt I was being manipulated by the author, not necessarily by Tessa but by the reactions of her family and friends.

I thought the family pretty one-dimensional (and Cal was just a pointless character) but I did like Zoey. In fact, I imagined a parallel narrative of the same book but told from her point of view. This was a bit too much of "All Tessa, all the time."

Flingo said it best, though, as this is a book that I wanted to like (and I did like) but it also annoyed me and the plot is pretty clichéd and it never made me feel teary. Personally, I'd have stopped her pocket money until she'd paid for the replacement wallpaper. Writing all over the walls like that! Take it out of that $260.

I didn't mind the frank talk about sex and drugs. What else is she supposed to do? I'd rather read about that than the nose bleed treatment :scared:

So it's both ** and **** from me. The younger brother was just there as a foil, but some of the writing was really good with a few stand out sentences that really hit home.