Dear Charlie by N.D Gomes

Synopsis (from Goodreads) 

Pages: 222

Publisher: Mira Ink 

Released: 20th of October 2016 

Death should never meet the young. But it did. Thanks to my brother, death made fourteen new friends that day. Maybe even fifteen, if you count Charlie.

At sixteen, Sam Macmillan is supposed to be thinking about girls, homework and his upcoming application to music college, not picking up the pieces after the school shooting that his brother Charlie committed.

Yet as Sam desperately tries to hang on to the memories he has of his brother, the media storm surrounding their family threatens to destroy everything. And Sam has to question all he thought he knew about life, death, right and wrong. 

What I Have to Say 

This is another book that I've found a bit too depressing for me. I don't really want to put down the book as bad because of it. It's about grief and grief is not a happy subject. But the books that I like are the ones that touch you. The emotions reach into you and elicit a response from the reader. This book just didn't do that. 

That's not to say I didn't emphasise with the characters. Sam's journey to understand his brother's death and find a way to grieve when the town around him won't let him was something that I could really understand. It really shows well the aftermath of such an event from an angle that hasn't been looked at before, with the family having to cope with the death of the son alongside the guilt of the terrible thing he did. 

It was a good book, I think. It just fell flat for me.