Product Description

Tessa has just a few months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is sex. Released from the constraints of 'normal' life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa's feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa's time finally runs out. "Before I Die" is a brilliantly-crafted novel, heartbreaking yet astonishingly life-affirming. It will take you to the very edge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #757 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
With only months left to live, 16-year-old Tessa makes a list of things she must experience: sex, petty crime, fame, drugs and true love. Downham's wrenching work features a girl desperate for a few thrilling moments before leukemia takes her away. Although Tessa remains ardently committed to her list, both she and the reader find comfort in the quiet resonance of the natural world. Tessa's soul mate, Adam, gardens next door; a bird benignly rots in grass; psychedelic mushrooms provide escape; an apple tree brings comfort; and her best friend, Zoey, ripens in the final months of pregnancy. Downham's lithe, facile writing creates a chiaroscuro of life and death, of organic growth and decay. Although Tessa begins to see herself within the natural continuum, she still feels furious with her lot. She lashes out and behaves cruelly at times, making her believable to teen readers. Because her experience feels so palpable, readers will believe that the novel's final pages might offer a crystalline vision of death. Lucid language makes a painful journey bearable, beautiful and transcendent. (Fiction. YA) (Kirkus Reviews)

Heat
'A novel that won't fail to touch those who read it...will make you happy to be alive'

From the Back Cover
It's really going to happen. They said it would, but this is quicker than anyone thought.

Everyone has to die. We all know it.

With only a few months of life left, sixteen-year-old Tessa knows it better than most.

She's made a list though - ten things she wants to do before she dies. Number one is sex. Starting tonight.

But getting what you want isn't easy. And getting what youwant doesn't always give you what you need. And sometimes the most unexpected things become important.

Uplifting, life-affirming, joyous - this extraordinary novel celebrates what it is to be alive by confronting what it's really like to die.

Customer Reviews

This book made me cry
The first book that made me cry. It's written in such a good way and seems so spontaneous even if it talks of such delicate subjects.

Unforgetable
This is one of the best books i have ever read. I am thirteen years old and this was very easy to read but still hard to put down. I raced to bed every night just to read it. In one word - amazing. =)

Something NOT to read before you die...
I was recommended this book by Amazon whilst searching for other books to read. Although it sounded good at the time, I didn't buy the book and forgot about it for a few months. When I saw the book on a shelf at work whilst on a break, I immediately remembered all the praise and good reviews it had recieved, and bought it there and then.

I began reading on the way home but the first few pages didn't really grab me - the main character, Tessa babbled on about every small detail of what was happening to her at that moment, how she could hear people unzipping their coats and such. I'm all for details and hanging on, but it was overdone.

As I continued reading, in the hope things might get better, it became clear that Tessa wasn't particularly developed as a character and I was finding it very difficult to see how people had cried over her eventual death at the end of the book - there's nothing to get attached to. She wasn't particularly nice as a person, was rude to her family constantly and although she was dying, didn't want to be her own person or find herself and what she wanted - she was still wrapped up in pleasing her "friend" Zoey. This alleged friend seems to forget that Tessa is terminally ill and takes her out to go clubbing with the main aim of finding her a guy - any guy for Tessa to lose her virginity to. Strangely enough, Tessa doesn't seem to mind all that much about the way Zoey treats her; doing anything Zoey tells her to. This even includes walking up a man in the street and telling him she loves him; yet another seemingly pointless task designed to amuse her so called friend and revealing the sort of teenager Tessa would have continued to be, had she not become terminally ill.

For the first 20 or so pages it mostly leads up to this final scene where Tessa goes go home with a stranger Zoey picks out for her in a club; after debating about whether to go home with him and get on with number one of her list, Tessa goes. What followed next was with a complete lack of emotions and feelings - the whole event itself was over with the exact words "This is it. It's really happening. I'm living it now. Sex.". Not only that, but previously, Tessa hadn't even kissed anyone, making this whole escapade highly unlikely, and had it occurred, I would have expected her to show a lot more emotion - she's dying, this is it, this is supposed to be her one chance to go out into the world and discover, learn, find out.

All in all, it feels like the author had a good idea for a plot, but the characters are cold, empty and I really couldn't have cared less whether or not Tessa died, whether she completed her list and what filled the 300 pages in between. Although Tessa's father gets upset on some occasions the way it's described you just can't feel anything for him.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone and I can't wait to get rid of it - its no reflection of what cancer is really like at all.