Happy Book Birthday to Daisy Whitney’s WHEN YOU WERE HERE (one of my favorite books of the year)!!!
Title: WHEN YOU WERE HERE
Author: Daisy Whitney
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Number of Pages: 257
Source of Book: ARC from publisher at NCTE
When You Were Here, Lost in Translation meets Where She Went,
is about an American teenager who travels from California to Tokyo to
uncover the secrets surrounding the death of his mother, all while
trying to both hold onto and let go of the girl he’s been in love with
his whole life.
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 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.
