A review by thetomatowriter
Before I Die by Jenny Downham

4.0

I liked the way the chapters were framed kind of like "moments," tying into that theme at the end. I like that Tessa didn't deal with her illness with this saintly grace that served as a lesson of goodness to those around her, but rather like an actual human teenager would. I LOVED her relationship with each member of her family, and her family as a whole. I also thought it was good at the end the way the chapters became scattered and confused, hard to read, because she was close to dying. The brief moments of chapters, however, make it a read with a lot of stops and starts, and it took me a little while longer to read this than it might usually for a book of similar size. It also didn't really GRAB me the way some books do. I didn't really feel that ache of wanting to actually know these characters in real life. It didn't make me as sad as the story probably should have. I really liked it, and I think it's one of the better "cancer books" out there (for what it's worth coming from a person who does not actually have cancer, so not much). But it didn't really wow me.