After You by Julie Buxbaum

SUMMARY:

"When tragedy strikes across the ocean, Ellie Lerner drops everything—her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs—to travel to London and pick up the pieces of her best friend Lucy’s life. While Lucy’s husband, Greg, retreats into himself, his and Lucy’s eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, has simply stopped speaking. Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them, so, too, do Lucy’s secrets—some big, some small. Peeling back the layers of her friend’s life, Ellie is forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she’d hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie’s carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life—and the lives of those around her—forever."

REVIEW:

I LOVED this book! I thought it was well written and really quick to suck you in; I read this book in a total of two days! The characters were all well crafted, and I felt like I really got to know them all.  I especially fell in love with Lucy's daughter Sophie, a bookworm whose thirst for knowledge has left her socially isolated.  I also love her little friend, Inderpal who is as thirsty for knowledge as she is.  The story was very moving to me, especially having lost a very close friend; it is very relate-able. A lot of the reactions to Lucy's death were realistic, and were reactions to death that I have seen firsthand.   The author wrote it so realistically that I could feel what the characters were feeling, which I loved.  I didn't really like who Lucy turned out to be, though.  It just goes to show that you never really know people as well as you think you do. It really made me think about my relationships with my friends and what each of us may decide to tell each other or keep secret.