Six Goodbyes We Never Said
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two teens meet after tragedy and learn about love, loss, and letting go
Naima Rodriguez doesn’t want your patronizing sympathy as she grieves her father, her hero—a fallen Marine. She’ll hate you forever if you ask her to open up and remember him “as he was,” though that’s all her loving family wants her to do in order to manage her complex OCD and GAD. She’d rather everyone back the-eff off while she separates her Lucky Charms marshmallows into six, always six, Ziploc bags, while she avoids friends and people and living the life her father so desperately wanted for her.
Dew respectfully requests a little more time to process the sudden loss of his parents. It's causing an avalanche of secret anxieties, so he counts on his trusty voice recorder to convey the things he can’t otherwise say aloud. He could really use a friend to navigate a life swimming with pain and loss and all the lovely moments in between. And then he meets Naima and everything’s changed—just not in the way he, or she, expects.
Candace Ganger's Six Goodbyes We Never Said is no love story. If you ask Naima, it’s not even a like story. But it is a story about love and fear and how sometimes you need a little help to be brave enough to say goodbye.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biracial (Latinx and white) Naima, 17, and Dew, 15, who is Latinx, have both recently lost parents and also struggle with mental health challenges. When the two become neighbors in Ivy Springs, Ind., however, their attraction to each other is anything but mutual. Sweet Dew's clumsy, overly cordial overtures put irritable Naima off; she would rather console herself than become involved with someone as complicated as she thinks she is. Eventually, though, the two establish an unconventional friendship (she is sharp with him; he feels most comfortable when he's speaking into a mic attached to a tape recorder) as Naima, who is spending the summer with her grandparents, awaits her late Marine father's memorial and Dew adjusts to living with his adoptive parents and sister. With great empathy, Ganger (The Inevitable Collision of Birdie and Bash) alternates the protagonists' points of view, revealing the way Naima navigates her OCD, anxiety and depression, and PTSD, and Dew handles his social anxiety amid their grief, loneliness, and sorrow. Through the teens' humorously awkward gravitation toward each other, Ganger creates a heartfelt, convincing story about the restorative power of self-care and friendship. Ages 14 up.
