★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This was a good book. I liked the characters and the storyline. The reasons Sam and Sadie found to be mad at the other were a little frustrating, but I think that’s ultimately the lesson they each needed to learn. The portrayal of grief and loss was really well done.
Highlights
There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
Sadie came up with the idea for Both Sides on the night Sam went missing, and she’d been turning it over in her head ever since. It wasn’t much then. A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.
At the friend’s funeral, there was an open casket. When Sadie looked in the coffin, she almost felt as if she were looking at herself. She felt as if she had died, as if she were the one who was supposed to have died, and that somehow, she and the friend had switched places. She was so disturbed, she ran out of the service, apologizing to the friend’s ruined parents on the way out.
It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.
You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that “game over” is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final. You could have taken poison, fallen into a vat of acid, been decapitated, been shot a hundred times, and still, if you clicked restart, you could begin it all over again. Next time, you would get it right. Next time, you might even win.