What to Say Next by Julie Buxbaum

ARC, 287 pages
Release Date: July 11, 2017
Published by: Delacorte Press
Read from: July 4-8, 2017
Stad-alone
Source: TxLA 2017
For fans of:  Contemporary, Romance, Diversity, Grief, Realistic Fiction, 


     From the New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Three Things comes a charming and poignant story about two struggling teenagers who find an unexpected connection just when they need it most. For fans of Sophie Kinsella, Jennifer Niven, and Rainbow Rowell.
     Sometimes a new perspective is all that is needed to make sense of the world.
     KIT: I don’t know why I decide not to sit with Annie and Violet at lunch. It feels like no one here gets what I’m going through. How could they? I don’t even understand.
     DAVID: In the 622 days I’ve attended Mapleview High, Kit Lowell is the first person to sit at my lunch table. I mean, I’ve never once sat with someone until now. “So your dad is dead,” I say to Kit, because this is a fact I’ve recently learned about her.
     When an unlikely friendship is sparked between relatively popular Kit Lowell and socially isolated David Drucker, everyone is surprised, most of all Kit and David. Kit appreciates David’s blunt honesty—in fact, she finds it bizarrely refreshing. David welcomes Kit’s attention and her inquisitive nature. When she asks for his help figuring out the how and why of her dad’s tragic car accident, David is all in. But neither of them can predict what they’ll find. Can their friendship survive the truth?

*MY THOUGHTS*

     I can normally finish a book this short in a day or a day and a half. This one took me four days to read because it touched me like no other book. Reading books with this amount of grief wear on me. And sometimes finishing it gets hard. 
"It's nice to sit with someone and not have to think about what to say next."
pg. 31
     David and Kit have not crossed paths much before. Until one day when Kit decides to sit at his lunch table. They end up deciding to figure out all the details about her dad's accident. Neither of them are prepared for what they are going to find. 
"Seriously,' I say and let the no shit pass without comment, even though she knows it's an expreession I do not like. It makes me think of constipation, which maes me think about grunting, my least favorite noise, after squawking and chewing."
pg. 43
                As a character driven reader, I can honestly say the characters were my favorite part. I saw something in all of them that reminded me of myself, but the one I connected with most was a supporting character. I connected most with Lauren, David’s older sister. Not because I was unbelievably cool (although I do think I am sometimes lol) but because I WAS her. I STILL AM her. In case you didn’t know, my sister was once diagnosed with a mild form of autism. To be clearer, the doctors said “they weren’t really sure what [she] has.” As for David, I was thankful that Buxbaum included both points of view because now my sister can see herself in a book.
"They seem to understand that the world is a big, diverse place, and that different is not the same things as scary. It' amazing to me how many people mistake the two."
pg. 48
                The only reason this doesn’t get five stars from me is the plot. Although there is a HUGE plot twist at the end, to me, it seemed like it took way too long to get there. For the book to be less than 300 pages, for most of the book I just felt like there wasn’t much going on. It seemed like it was dragging and as it turns out it was only a span of a couple of days. It just didn’t seem right to me.
"You can't get rid of me that easily,' I say. 'I'm like a bad rash."
pg. 94
                Lastly, I know I really liked a book when I realize that I felt such a wide range of emotions when reading it. With this one, I laughed, I got mad, and I got incredibly sad, complete with an audible gasp. I wasn’t expecting this book to make me do these, but it was a welcome experience. (I have learned my lesson of not reading the synopsis of books by authors that I’ve read and liked before. I saw the cover and was expecting light and fluffy like Tell Me Three Things smh lol)
"What if we all jumped out of out of our boxes and chewed up our stupid labels? Who would we discover?"
pg. 160
                This book was not what I was expecting, but in a good way. I wish it had ended a different way, but for the most part, it was still a great book. I remember merely liking her other book, so this one really snuck up on me. I’m super interested in what she comes up with next. 
Overall, I give this

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