This was a beautifully written book about finding your way after loss, the grieving process and surviving high school, discovering both first love and who you are as a person.

Julie Buxbaum explained in a note to readers that she didn’t want to write just another dead mom book. And she didn’t. This is the most beautifully crafted story. It’s evident after reading the author’s note that she was writing this novel looking back on the loss of her own mom when she was fourteen. I can’t find words for how truthfully and eloquently she executes this.

YA is often criticized for being too melodramatic. Those critics miss the point entirely, because what is the teenage experience without melodrama? I think some YA authors just write it better than others. If this criticism is what keeps you away from YA, then you just haven’t read a good author and you need to read this book. That melodramatic, world-revolves-around-me, immature, too young to have seen the world yet, everything is a first experience, that includes big love and big loss- this is done incredibly well in this book!!

I like to go into books pretty blind, so while I knew I was picking up a YA romance, I didn’t realize I was picking up a “dead mom” book. (Calling it that only bc Buxbaum herself used the term.). It’s not a spoiler because it’s a major theme of the book from as early as page 9, if not before. With the fairly recent loss of my mother this makes me only slightly hesitant (because it’s uncanny how many books one can pick up that feature themes of cancer and death of a parent- it’s shows up in the least obvious of places when mostly you’re NOT looking people, trust me). Anyway, maybe I did know this going into Tell Me Three Things, maybe my subconscious just glazed over that line in the blurb.

Doesn’t matter because this book is so well written, it explores this loss with perfection. I felt all of the emotions and I’m better for it. If all dead mom books were like this one, I’d seek them out willingly.

Let me repeat. It’s not just a dead mom book. Yes it’s filled with tons of (incredibly thoughtful and accurate) reflections on grieving. But also- It’s filled with incredibly smart humor. It’s filled with bookish references that will make fellow bibliophiles swoon. It’s filled with a love triangle (love square?) that will give you all the giddy first love/high school crush feels. It’s filled with a mystery of an anonymous online persona, that will make you think you have it solved and have one up on the main character as you read, but in actuality will keep you guessing until the very last pages.

Recommended from Modern Mrs. Darcy 2020 Summer reading guide, and she’s done it again.

And now some of my favorite quotes:

“Maybe self-centered narcissists like me don’t deserve mothers.” (This quote is meta- so many layers like peeling an onion, but I put it here to illustrate the point I made on melodrama in YA. This sentence sums it up.)

“Perfect days are for people with small, realizable dreams. Or maybe for all of us, they just happen in retrospect; they’re only now perfect because they contain something irrevocably and irretrievably lost.”

“One is the worst parts about someone dying is thinking back to all those times you didn’t ask the right questions, all those times you stupidly assumed you’d have all the time in the world. And this too: how all that time feels like not much time at all. What’s left feels like something manufactured. The overexposed ghosts of memories.”

“Sometimes a kiss is not a kiss is not a kiss. Sometimes it’s poetry.”