I Was Here - Gayle Forman

Young Adult
Pages: 288
Publisher: Viking Juvenile
Release Date: January 27, 2015
Goodreads / Amazon

Cody and Meg were inseparable...
Until they weren’t.

When her best friend, Meg, drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything—so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg’s college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there’s a lot that Meg never told her. About her old roommates, the sort of people Cody never would have met in her dead-end small town in Washington. About Ben McAllister, the boy with a guitar and a sneer, and some secrets of his own. And about an encrypted computer file that Cody can’t open—until she does, and suddenly everything Cody thought she knew about her best friend’s death gets thrown into question.

Gayle Forman wrote one of my favorite books in the world. In Where She Went she managed to have a lifetime fangirl in me. Thus, I will read anything she writes. However, I admit she hasn't even come close to doing that again with her latest books. I Was Here is different from her usual mainly romantic style. It didn't have the whirlwind of emotions some of her other books have. It was a more straight-to-the-point book. This story is about loss and guilt, and how to cope with them. It's about forgiving people and forgiving yourself. And I really wish some of these themes were laced with more raw feelings than the book actually had.

Obviously, the writing is fantastic. The dialogue though, lacked the usual carefulness and subtlety that her other books have. There's are quite some strong cuss words in there thrown around carelessly. It has a dark undertone in the character's families that make the book darker than a romance.

Cody's voice pulled me in right away. She was bitterly sarcastic in a really satisfying way. Some of the "white trash" remarks she made constantly became a bit irk-y but she was a no-BS smart chick and I loved it. Overall, it was a very enjoyable novel about yet another subject that should be written more often.