When Kacey Left

Starred review from July 15, 2015
When Kacey left-by committing suicide-she abandoned her best friend, Sara. Sara was "Sticks" and Kacey, "Stones," and they planned to travel the world together, share the same dorm room, and raise their children in houses side by side. But when Kacey decided to take her own life, Sara is left behind to find her way through the grief and re-envision a future without Kacey in it. Told through a collection of journal entries, written as letters from Sara to her dead best friend, Green's raw and achingly honest debut does a masterful job capturing the intense spectrum of emotions felt by a teenage girl trying to make sense of the senseless. From disbelief to guilt to rage, Sara's entries are intimate and sincere, and readers will have a difficult time reminding themselves that they are reading a work of fiction as opposed to the secret diary of a close friend. While the bulk of Sara's entries focus on her feelings about Kacey, it's also worth noting that she spends a considerable amount of time wrestling with her frustration with the school administration for refusing to acknowledge what Kacey did for fear of somehow glorifying it. Her insistence that the community can only heal when the truth is openly addressed is a valuable lesson for readers touched by teen suicide. An honest and heartbreaking journey toward healing. (Fiction. 12-16)

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August 1, 2015

Gr 8 Up-Kacey and Sara, aka Sticks and Stones, have been best friends since the third grade. They did everything together. But Kacey had a dark secret that she never shared with Sara. Now Kacey is gone and Sara is trying to figure out how to cope with the hole that has been left in her world. The "OC" (Obnoxious Councilor) that Sara's parents make her see thinks that writing letters to Kacey in a journal will help her work through her grief. She gives it a try and her emotional, confused story pours out. This book might get lost in the slew of recent titles about suicide. The writing feels forced, and while Sara is a sympathetic character to whom teens would relate, recent titles such as Gayle Forman's I Was Here (Viking) and Jasmine Warga's My Heart and Other Black Holes (HarperCollins, both 2015) might be more accessible. VERDICT An additional purchase where Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (Penguin, 2007) or John Green's Looking for Alaska (Dutton, 2005) are popular.-Claire Covington, Waynesboro Public Library, VA

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