@internrachel @julia1

I just finished Hello, I Must Be Going by Christie Hodgen (312 pages).

A tomboy named Frankie has a father who is a Vietnam vet who lost his leg in the war. He does a good job masking his pretty severe depression with humor, but it’s still too much for him and he ends up killing himself. This book is about Frankie’s journey through the aftermath of his suicide and its lasting effects on her life. It does a really good job of showing how profoundly something like that can impact you in ways you don’t even realize. For instance, even though Frankie is very good at school and takes all the AP courses, she can’t see the point in applying for college because she honestly cannot imagine anything good happening to her. It’s not like she’s feeling sorry for herself or anything, it’s just that the trauma of her father’s death (she was the one who found the body, btw) and her own depression have rendered her incapable of believing her own life has meaning or that she’s capable of accomplishing anything of worth.

It’s a very well written book and the characters are very vivid. This is definitely one of those books that’s all about the characters, rather than moving a plot from Point A through Point B toward a destination of Point C. Know what I mean? I think Frankie’s father was especially well done. Even after his death, there are lengthy scenes of him through memories Frankie is experiencing, so you get to see a very nuanced portrait of a man with a lot of charm and love, even as he struggles with pain and darkness in ways that his children were too young to understand at the time.