(Credit: Janice Lynn Mather)

“Trying to be normal can be penance too,” says Pru in Where Was Goodbye? by Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel set in Nassau, Bahamas. Karmen Wallace is a 17-year-old entering her final year of high school who is in the aftermath of the very recent suicide of her older brother, Julian. Along with her parents, Karmen was blindsided when Julian left the house one day, barefoot, and never came home, leaving behind no note. Karmen is left alone with their depressed mother, a counsellor by trade who cannot change out of her dirty bathrobe or wash her hair, and their quick-tempered father, whose philosophy is that for things to go back to normal you must force them to.

Armed with Julian’s skateboard, his backpack that contains a letter from university telling him he was on probation, and still feeling like she can hear his voice, Karmen arrives at school feeling estranged from nearly everything she was before Julian’s death. This new Karmen is drawn to Pru, a rule-breaking, skateboarder girl who fits in even less than Karmen does. One thing, however, is consistent for Karmen: her crush, Isaiah. Their relationship is a tender highlight of the book.

After Karmen gets in trouble at school, she must take a mandatory leave. She pursues counselling and is supposed to complete her schoolwork remotely, but, instead, uses the time to unravel the final months of Julian’s life, as she hopes to understand why he died, as a gift to him in time for his birthday. Karmen’s quest takes her to the university and the wilds of the Bahamas, which Mather captures with delicately recounted scenes and descriptions of Karmen’s progress in learning to skateboard, replete with falls. The precariousness of the sport mirrors Karmen’s disorienting grief as she retraces her brother’s steps.

With every new witness to Julian’s life she meets, more about his life and death is revealed and the reader learns a heartbreaking truth along with Karmen: no matter the level of loss, there is always potentially more to lose.

Filled with intense emotion and sumptuous lines such as “joy has feathers,” the novel realistically portrays struggling youth, isolation in the gap between high school and university, and how after a tragedy we can be left with unanswered questions amid the silent, inanimate objects of the deceased’s life – and it is up to us to find meaning and keep the dead alive with our memories.