“Just a normal Tuesday” has been in my Kindle for some time now and I just couldn’t decide to start reading it. And then one day I said to myself that I need to read that book. It has been waiting for way too long! What I great decision that was!

Kai is a teenage girl that is very close to her older sister Jen. Jen is her idol, the person she turns to whenever she wants an advice, or to share happy moments and her thoughts, or even just to chat about anything! They are very close and Jen always looks after her little sister, no matter what. They know each other very well as they share all their little secrets, or at least that is the impression Kai has.

Until one day she returns home to find a letter from Jen waiting for her. An another for her mother. And another one for her father. This does not seem right so Kai opens Jen’s letter in the solitude of her own room. She believes it is very personal and she is right as the letter is a suicide not to Kai. This is more than a shock to the girl, but she finds the courage to run to Jen’s house, only to find out that she is too late. After that, her whole world crumbles. Her whole family is broken into pieces and Kai is walking to the edge of an emotional cliff until her parents decide to send her to a grief camp. There, among other kids her own age and with similar experiences, should should be able to morn and recover and come back to reality.

The whole story is very emotional, right there from the start. The relationship between the two sisters is becoming known to the reader through Kai’s memories and it becomes clear that they were very close, that Jen was like a second mother to Kai, given also their age difference. So it becomes pretty obvious, why Kai is so devastated. Not only she lost a sibling. She lost the person she confided to, the one she considered most valuable and precious of all, her alter ego. Therefore it was certain that it would have a great impact on Kai.

Kai loses herself when she loses her sister. She hits the ground just like someone else in her place would have. Grief is handled differently by each and everyone and this one takes it really ugly. It was not nice to see how Kai responded to grief. It became a bit surreal I think. However, since this is fiction, it does not feel odd.

However, what is so important in this book, is the light that comes after Kai decides to try and move forward. It promotes the idea that whenever you are in a dark place, all it takes to come back from there is to be open to the little slice of light that may come from a person you never expected to reach out for you. Either that person be someone else or yourself. Hope may come at any moment. If you lose someone, the world is not lost. You are not lost.

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