There are some truly touching and insightful moments here, and I feel the book was well worth reading. I am left, however, with the vague sense of unfinished-ness, perhaps as though this was the start of a larger novel but it was left in this bare-bones state instead. I do not have a clear picture in my head of what any of the characters looked like, except that one was very petite and another was very large and another had long legs. I don't have a sense of how they spoke. While for the most part the mind fills in these details when reading, in this case it felt like the characters simply lacked substance. Because this book was inspired by the author's real life experience of losing a friend to cancer, I feel unkind even mentioning those things. But I do so because if this is a fictionalized version the author should feel free to fictionalize and make the story and characters more available to the reader. On some level I feel the intensity and personal nature of the experience perhaps made it difficult for the author to truly allow fictional characters to fully inhabit their roles. I could be wrong, of course; the author may have purposely left the story and characters somewhat vague in order to allow the reader to imagine themselves or their loved ones in the story. In either case it just missed the mark a bit for me.