Review: Before I Die by Jenny Downham | Review | The Observer
Robert Collins reviews Before I Die by Jenny Downham
When you read the final pages of Jenny Downham's debut novel through tears, don't say you weren't warned. Before I Die is narrated by a perceptive, witty 16-year-old called Tessa Scott. Tessa has been living with leukaemia for four years. And, by the end of the book, she will die. There's no use fighting this. It tells you right there in the title. Even with this foreknowledge, it's hard not to feel a stab of resentment as you're confronted by something as sentimentally sucker-punching as Before I Die. This much-hyped novel is destined to drive hundreds of thousands of readers to tears and to swift injunctions to all their friends to read it...
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