Seventeen-year-old Tess Fowler has just dropped out of high school. She can barely function after learning of Jonah’s death. Jonah, the boy she’d traded banter with over texts and heartfelt e-mails.
Jonah, the first boy she’d told she loved and the first boy to say it back.
Jonah, the boy whose suicide she never saw coming.
Tess continues to write to Jonah, as a way of processing her grief and confusion. But for now she finds solace in perhaps the unlikeliest of ways: by helping her father with his new alternative funeral business, where his biggest client is . . . a prized racehorse?
As Tess’s involvement in her father’s business grows, both find comfort in the clients they serve and in each other. But love, loss, and life are so much more complicated than Tess ever thought. Especially after she receives a message that turns her life upside down.
Funny, heartbreaking, hopeful, and wondrous, in the vein of Six Feet Under and I’ll Give You the Sun, Things I’m Seeing Without You is a beautiful examination of what it means to love someone, to lose someone, and to love again.
Young Adult Literature is no stranger to heartache, it is no stranger to gritty stories, of grief and sorrow. With our ever changing world and living our lives, out over social media, coping with death and grief is also something that now has a place in cyberspace.
The Things I Am Seeing Without You has so many faucets to life as a young adult in this day and cyber age and can be an eye opener to those who pay attention.
Tess is struggling after losing her special friend to suicide and learning to live her life all over again. A story of first love, family and friendship in a time when many suffer from some form of mental illness, it is a story of the heart.
Enter for a chance to be one (1) of three (3) winners to receive a hardcover copy of Things I’m Seeing Without You by Peter Bognanni. (ARV: $17.99 each).
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Enter between 12:00 AM Eastern Time on September 25, 2017 and 12:00 AM on October 16, 2017. Open to residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia who are 13 and older. Winners will be selected at random on or about October 18, 2017. Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited or restricted by law.
Peter Bognanni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut novel, The House of Tomorrow, won the LA Times award for first fiction and the ALA Alex Award and has been adapted into a feature film. He teaches creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
