Grief. That chalky feeling in your chest. Feeling it expand slowly until you can taste the damp taste of tears on your tongue and your eyes and you didn’t think it possible but your heart actually hurts. Grief. The sense of having the floor wrenched away from under your feet and now somehow, you are in constant free fall. You don’t know when you will fall but you know one thing: when you do, it will hurt. When that numbness is gone, you will hurt so much more than you have ever hurt before.If you are like me and do not read contemporary YA as much as you probably should, then I think you definitely should read this one. So often in YA novels, people (especially parents) die but we never actually explore what it means to grieve. We are shown a week or two of melodrama or melancholy and then the heroine is up and fighting monsters. The truth is, when someone you love dies, it, in a sense, cripples you. You end up crying at the sound of sirens because you are reminded of that fateful night or one word or any other innocuous thing will send you reeling back into memories you didn’t think you had. You don’t get up to fight monsters, you almost cease to function because losing someone you love is a permanent goodbye and it takes time to get over it.Something that Fall For Anything by Courtney Summers conveys so beautifully in her book. Eddie is not someone you can either like or dislike. You, if you have been through something similar, can empathize with her feelings. Her search for the meaning of her father’s suicide is unbelievably poignant – why - is perhaps one of the most important questions she will ever ask and it is also one of the questions she may never get the answer to because the one person who could answer it is gone. As Eddie’s world collapses, the person she should have gotten strength from, her mother, collapses as well, too broken up to understand or comprehend anything.The only constant in her life is Milo. Her best friend and even he seems to be drifting further apart as his one time girlfriend comes back into town. And then Eddie meets Culler, a photographer, her father’s student and with him, she seeks answers to that important question: why.The book is gorgeous. The characters are well hewn and the plot thought out and logical. This is one of those books that you will read and carry inside of you for a while because the beauty with which Eddie finally reaches her peace with the world, finally comes to terms with her feelings and finally lets herself feel something other than pain and a baffled hurt will touch you just as it touched me. I recommend – no, I insist that you read this book. You won’t regret it.
