Six Goodbyes We Never Said
Two teens meet after tragedy and learn about love, loss, and letting go
Naima Rodriguez doesn’t want your patronizing sympathy as she grieves her father, her hero—a fallen Marine. She’ll hate you forever if you ask her to open up and remember him “as he was,” though that’s all her loving family wants her to do in order to manage her complex OCD and GAD. She’d rather everyone back the-eff off while she separates her Lucky Charms marshmallows into six, always six, Ziploc bags, while she avoids friends and people and living the life her father so desperately wanted for her.
Dew respectfully requests a little more time to process the sudden loss of his parents. It's causing an avalanche of secret anxieties, so he counts on his trusty voice recorder to convey the things he can’t otherwise say aloud. He could really use a friend to navigate a life swimming with pain and loss and all the lovely moments in between. And then he meets Naima and everything’s changed—just not in the way he, or she, expects.
Candace Ganger's Six Goodbyes We Never Said is no love story. If you ask Naima, it’s not even a like story. But it is a story about love and fear and how sometimes you need a little help to be brave enough to say goodbye.
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Community Reviews
Naima has the toughest of exteriors but on the inside is a tornado of emotions that she’s not sure how to navigate. Her dad was just killed in action and after not speaking to him for months she’s not sure exactly how to feel other than to take things out on others, especially her stepmom. When she goes to live with her grandparents she meets the strange boy next door. He seems to know a lot about her but she knows nothing about him. As she gets to know Dew, she starts to discover the keys to coping with her father’s loss, and finds ways to open up about how she feels. Her journey through such an extremely emotional time is so well done in Candace’s writing.
Dew lost both his parents in a car accident and is now living with his adoptive parents Stella and Thomas. He is a quirky person who always finds his parents words coming to mind whenever he’s faced with any kind of challenge. He is full of wisdom and when he meets a man in the coffee shop he works at a year prior he finally figures out what he’s to do with his interactions with him. When he meets Naima he tries his best to befriend her despite how much she fights against him and by the end they’ve build a friendship only they could understand.
I loved the way Candace portrayed grief within these two teenagers and showed that despite the differences in the way each person grieves they can also find common ground in how they learn to cope with it. There were so many beautiful quotes throughout this book and it will definitely hit you in the feels. If you love books that encompass mental health, grief, and friendship than you’ll love this wonderfully written YA contemporary!
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