Six Goodbyes We Never Said - Candace Ganger

Six Goodbyes We Never Said is the story of teens trying to navigate life after loss while figuring out what family and home mean in their new realities.  This is no YA love story, it is a story of broken people trying to help each other hold it together and heal. 

The author does a great job showing how a song can come to represent everything, how magical thinking can feel like the only “Safe” way to think and the rocky road we travel in our relationships.   
The characters are embraced for their unique, individual quirkiness (auras and horoscopes and Rick Flair- oh my).

This was a slow starter and characters appeared with no back story or very small fragments of back story that made it difficult to connect with them at times.

The chapter openings and closings were very interesting and sad: purposefully missed calls from a father far away, emails never sent, an internal monologue made external by way of “reporting”.

I wanted to like Naima but, as she wished, she was prickly and hard to like.  The shining star of this story is Dew, sweet and broken and trying to make everyone else well and complete while avoiding his own trauma.  

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
3.5 rounded to 4