Love and loss often tend to go hand in hand. It’s the bittersweet part of living a full life surrounded by those you love. Losing someone is one of the hardest, most complex events to process. Accepting and understanding the feelings that we experience and live with takes time. And of course, books are my absolute favorite way to assist in processing what I’m feeling. All the books below are specially selected because they beautifully express in different ways what it is to love and experience a loss.
This book is easily one of the most gut wrenching and beautiful stories I’ve read in the last year. It takes you on Skylar’s journey grieving the loss of her father, and how it shapes her life. The experience of grief is only the tip of the iceberg in this story, when soon after she discovers her mother is still alive! This shock leads to the forced uprooting of her life and a move to the other side of the country. At first what seems like the worst thing in the world leads to her seeking comfort in baking and entering in a local competition. There she meets a girl just as lost as her, a frustratingly irresistible boy next door, and begins to pick up the pieces of her shattered world.
Exactly like the title, How to Love You When You’re Gone, asks and answers the question that so many of us face when we lose someone, where does the love go? High school senior Mayte has never been kissed, but it hardly matters. Her abuelita has cancer, her half-sister with special needs has moved in, and college is off the table—family comes first. She keeps her problems to herself; why burden everyone she loves with more? But when she meets Auggie, while a rough start at first, the pair soon begins developing feelings more than friendship… Sometimes healing takes you to places that you wouldn’t otherwise find. An honest reflection of grief and an exploration of family this novel has so much depth but simultaneously manages to keep you laughing throughout it all.
This novel is so unlike so many stories about death and grief I have come across. It takes an unconventional angle exploring the magic of faith during trying times. When trying to find the psychic that predicted her boyfriend’s death, she meets a poser medium who belongs to the Life and Death Parade — a group of supposed charlatans that explore, and exploit, the thin veil between this world and the next. A group whose members include the psychic . . . and Kitty’s late mother.
If you could choose one person to bring back to life, who would it be? A question that in this novel is not a hypothetical. And when Lake’s best friend and boyfriend dies, she faces an impossible choice. With the resurrection technology that changed the world, each citizen gets one resurrection to be used ONLY on your eighteenth birthday. But things get even more complicated as Lake grapples with a secret–and illegal–vow she made years ago to resurrect someone else… someone who’s not even dead yet.
This is such a refreshing read. Funny yet moving, combining all the heartfelt emotions of first loves, last wishes, and letting go into one beautiful story. Maddie’s summer is turned upside down when her young-at-heart, socialite grandmother (also Maddie’s closest confidante) announces she’s terminally ill. And she has another announcement; She has booked the family on a secret “death with dignity” cruise ship so that she can leave the world in her own unconventional way– and give the O’Neill clan an unforgettable summer of dreams-come-true in the process. Soon, Maddie is on the trip of a lifetime with her over-the-top family. As they travel the globe, Maddie bonds with other passengers and falls for Enzo, who is processing his own grief. A summer she won’t forget shaped by love, loss, and the power of forgiveness.
To ten-year-old Jamie, his family has fallen apart because of the loss of someone he barely remembers: his sister Rose, who died five years ago in a terrorist bombing. To his father, life is impossible to make sense of when he lives in a world that could so cruelly take away a ten-year-old girl. To Rose’s surviving fifteen-year-old twin, Jas, every day she lives in Rose’s ever-present shadow, forever feeling the loss like a limb, but unable to be seen for herself alone. Told with warmth and humor, this powerful novel is a sophisticated take on one family’s struggle to make sense of the loss that’s torn them apart… and their discovery of what it means to stay together.
