Review: Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 304

Received: Received from Random House of Canada in exchange for an honest review

Release Date: August 7, 2012
Buy From Amazon.ca / Buy From Chapters.ca

Goodreads Synopsis:

In the spirit of ONE DAY, comes a fresh and warmhearted love story for the 21st century. Sometimes the end is just the beginning . . .

Sam Elling works for an internet dating company, but he still can't get a date. So he creates an algorithm that will match you with your soul mate. Sam meets the love of his life, a coworker named Meredith, but he also gets fired when the company starts losing all their customers to Mr. and Ms. Right.

When Meredith's grandmother, Livvie, dies suddenly, Sam uses his ample free time to create a computer program that will allow Meredith to have one last conversation with her grandmother. Mining from all her correspondence—email, Facebook, Skype, texts—Sam constructs a computer simulation of Livvie who can respond to email or video chat just as if she were still alive. It's not supernatural, it's computer science.

Meredith loves it, and the couple begins to wonder if this is something that could help more people through their grief. And thus, the company RePose is born. The business takes off, but for every person who just wants to say good-bye, there is someone who can't let go.

In the meantime, Sam and Meredith's affection for one another deepens into the kind of love that once tasted, you can't live without. But what if one of them suddenly had to? This entertaining novel, delivers a charming and bittersweet romance as well as a lump in the throat exploration of the nature of love, loss, and life (both real and computer simulated). Maybe nothing was meant to last forever, but then again, sometimes love takes on a life of its own.

My Review:

This is going to be a hard book to write a review on. This book was very emotional for me and I had a lot of issues getting through it because of everything going through my mind. This is one of those books that has caused me a "book hangover". I can't concentrate on another book because I think of everything that happened throughout this book. This is one that I will put on my to-read again pile (as soon as I finished it I wanted to turn the book over and start again...). This book really touched home with me because I lost someone really close to me (it was quite a few years ago, but I still think about what it would be like to spend time with him now...).

This book is definitely thought-provoking for readers. What would you give to talk to a loved one again after they have passed away? How do you think this would affect different communities? Frankel does a beautiful job showing the ways that technology like this could affect people in different ways. Frankel goes deep into the controversy a program like this would cause. The way Frankel shows the controversy gets to be very emotional, she shows how people react to this new program and it can her descriptions are heartbreakingly beautiful.

Frankel's writing style throughout the book was very different as well. I really loved how effortlessly she was able to go from a funny moment to making you cry in a matter of a few sentences. It's been awhile since I've been so emotional over a book, but Frankel hits everything. I found myself getting angry at the characters for what they were doing and then balling alongside them the next minute.

This book has a special place among my books and I will definitely be passing it along to everyone I know. I will be thinking about the idea of this book for weeks to come, this book is utterly unforgettable and one I will pick up again in the near future.