WHEN KACEY LEFT

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.