Review: When You Were Here

WHEN YOU WERE HERE
Daisy Whitney
Contemporary Young Adult
264 pages
Little, Brown
Available now
Source: Tour for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Danny's mother lost her five-year battle with cancer three weeks before his graduation-the one day that she was hanging on to see.

Now Danny is left alone, with only his memories, his dog, and his heart-breaking ex-girlfriend for company. He doesn't know how to figure out what to do with her estate, what to say for his Valedictorian speech, let alone how to live or be happy anymore.

When he gets a letter from his mom's property manager in Tokyo, where she had been going for treatment, it shows a side of his mother he never knew. So, with no other sense of direction, Danny travels to Tokyo to connect with his mother's memory and make sense of her final months, which seemed filled with more joy than Danny ever knew. There, among the cherry blossoms, temples, and crowds, and with the help of an almost-but-definitely-not Harajuku girl, he begins to see how it may not have been ancient magic or mystical treatment that kept his mother going. Perhaps, the secret of how to live lies in how she died.

MY THOUGHTS
When You Were Here is a slower story, one that doesn't leave us breathless and panting at the end but instead affects us in subtle ways that have no physical manifestation, though we feel its strength just the same. Danny's tale is akin to a watercolor painting – a few significant strokes are made, but they then spread out, crawling into the crevices and grooves of the paper of their own accord, slowly and inexorably changing the entire face of the artwork with their quiet bleeding. There's no dramatic action or epic battle with a villain, instead the colors of Danny's life creep outward after the initial strokes of his mom's death and the breakup with his girlfriend are swept across the paper, and we have the pleasure of watching as they take on a life of their own and create a beauty he would have never anticipated.

Danny is understandably in a bad place when we first meet him, finding it difficult to care about much of anything and popping Vicodin and Percocet with relative ease, but he's not so deep in a depression-lined hole that we can't reach him. He decides to take action rather quickly, returning to the city he and his mother loved to spend time in the most, and instead of simply wallowing there amidst the remnants of their life together, he goes out, asks questions, tracks down places she loved, and starts trying to find the peace his mother seemed to both so easily embrace and exude. Being in Tokyo isn't a miracle cure for him though, and while attempting to treat known wounds he inadvertently opens new ones, but part of healing is the acknowledgement of what is ailing, and Danny handles the revelations about his mom's life and his own life with admirable maturity and a refreshing lack of self-pity of any kind.

One of the highlights of this story is Danny's troubled relationship with childhood-friend-turned-girlfriend Holland, the pain of their abruptly terminated romance even more poignant than that of losing his mother, the questions surrounding the how's and why's of their breakup eating away at us page by page. His mother's death is of course prominent, but it's surprisingly not the aspect that reaches deep into our chests and squeezes our hearts tight, instead that action lies with Holland and the new fragility between her and Danny that seems as if it will simply break at any moment, shattering a young man already cracked wide open.

Those readers looking for a read that's not meant to keep them up late at night reading with its drama and action will likely thoroughly enjoy When You Were Here, the journey Danny embarks on one meant to be walked and fully absorbed rather than run and glimpsed in passing. It's luckily not as heavy as it could have been given the subject matter, and Ms. Whitney does a beautiful job of giving Danny's story due gravity without leeching all of our happiness as we read, infusing it with a great deal of hope and showing us all the possibilities that spring up in the wake of tragedy.

Rating: 4/5
 

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This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.