Review: "13 Ways to Say Goodbye" by Kate Fussner

13 Ways to Say Goodbye by Kate Fussner
Published March 2025 via HarperCollins
★★★★

When Nina's older sister Lily died, Nina's world fell apart. Her parents have retreated into grief, and without Lily, Nina has no road map—just the to-do lists Lily left behind. But although the last list has taken her to Paris for the summer, she knows that from here on out she'll be flying without a map. What she doesn't expect, though, is that this last list has a few surprises in store for her...

Like Fussner's first book, this is written in verse: She would hate / that I decided / my best path forward / was to follow hers / but I didn't know / what else to do. (loc. 547*) My favorite chapters/poems are the ones in which the form gets less conventional, because they force me to work a bit more for it, but as a whole they're cleanly put together. I'm not a huge fan of romance in middle grade (largely because I was not ready to be thinking about romance when I was that age, and I'm a fan of kids getting to be kids for longer), but I love the way the mini-romance is treated here: Nina and Sylvie are so tentative, so cautious—and what's more, they know that summer can't last forever. (Again: have read too many books where this is solved by "Surprise! I got a scholarship to study in Paris! Now we can be together forever!" and I just think it's valuable to let these shorter relationships, where the characters are figuring out what they want and what a healthy relationship looks like, play out.)

There's a mild supernatural element to the book. That's not generally my thing, but I think in this case it could have been explored just a wee bit more—Nina accepts it so easily (which actually makes a certain amount of sense, because it gives her a new way to process her grief, which is something she's desperate for), but it also slides back out of the story with barely a whisper, and she accepts that easily too. Perhaps an instance where some explanations were trialed and nothing quite fit.

Grief, first romance, and Paris—ingredients for an excellent sophomore book, as it turns out.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.