I have so much I want to say about this book, but I don't think I can. I'm equally raw and at peace after finishing it. For a person who has had suicide up close and personal in my life for as long as I can remember, this has been the best fictional handling of it I've ever read. These are people, not statistics, and it looks and feels different for everyone. It deserves our attention; it deserves our kindness, and it deserves to be heard.

This was not a pro-suicide or anti-suicide story. It was a story about people who have more hurt than you can imagine, each of them walking a very different path. I found myself neither rooting nor hoping for anything, just another passenger on the bus for the journey with the rest of them.

You do not have to be mentally ill to want to end things if the world you exist in is already sick.