Caitlin is retuning to school to start her junior year being confronted with far more than the usual concerns about planning for college. He best friend Ingrid committed suicide, and she is still coming to terms with what happened. She finds that everything that defined her, from her work in art photography to relating to those around her, has changed.

Some of these changes are not just because Caitlin has changed, but because other people who cared about Ingrid are deeply effected. Ms. Delani, the photography teacher who had been mentoring the girls, seems distant and overly critical of Caitlin's more recent work. Caitlin had always felt that Ms. Delani had tolerated her work because she was best friends with the truly-talented Ingrid.

Things start to come a bit into focus after she finds Ingrid's journal stashed away under her bed. Each day, she reads a single entry and finds insight into aspects of Ingrid's life that brought her to make the decisions she made.

Caitlin's parents are also very concerned about how the suicide will affect her so the decide to give her a project. She has always been good with her hands so they order a bunch of wood to work on a project in the yard. In a sense she is building a new special place while she is rebuilding her broken soul.

A new girl at school named Dylan, provides her with a new friend. A shared background as well as the ability to just spend time together talking and learning from each other strengthens the ties between them while also allowing them adapt to the changes in their lives.

Caitlin also finds herself growing closer and closer to Taykir, a fellow classmate. His best friend and Ingrid had always flirted with the possibility of a relationship, but it never happened since neither had spoken up about their feelings.

Last year, I read Thirteen Reasons by Jay Asher, another book relating to the issue of teen suicide that I found quite disappointing despite the very positive reviews. It was mostly because I felt it glorified suicide as an act of revenge while mis-categorizing the general psychology of a suicidal person. This book is everything that I was looking for in that novel.

Suicide causes many victims. While the most noticeable one is the person who has died, family, friends, teachers, and other folks in the person's life are greatly effected. This book does a great job of highlighting all of the victims, making the reader feel for each, while getting a better understanding. All of the characters are richly brought to life. While the story is presented primarily from Caitlin's perspective, supplemented with entries from Ingrid's diaries, the reader walks a way with a strong sense of how each person was affected by the suicide.