I Was Here

When her best friend Meg drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything—so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg’s college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there’s a lot that Meg never told her. About her old roommates, the sort of people Cody never would have met in her dead-end small town in Washington. About Ben McAllister, the boy with a guitar and a sneer, and some secrets of his own. And about an encrypted computer file that Cody can’t open—until she does, and suddenly everything Cody thought she knew about her best friend’s death gets thrown into question.

This is my first YA genre free book of the year and it was a doozy. I think deep down inside I am a teenaged girl because I love these books. The problem I find is that some of them are produced with little research or care, which as an adult I have a hard time looking past. Not so with this book.

When I first started this book I was coming off a sci-fi/fantasy binge, which meant that I was nervous to come back to the real world. This book touched on a subject matter that is hard and opened my eyes to a world I didn’t realize existed.

Kids: Remember that the internet is a dark place.

I will admit that there were times when I wanted to yell at Cody for making bad choices. But I would remind myself that she was a teenager and maybe wasn’t going to think things through. This was the first book of the year that made me think after I finished reading it.

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