Jenny Downham (2007) before I die

The picture on the cover of this book is a beautiful young girl, a cygnet, before becoming a swan. Below the author’s name, a gushing endorsement from the Sunday Times: ‘The year’s most talked about novel...extraordinary’. The ordinariness of the extraordinary has become something difficult to live down. Here we have a sixteen-year old adolescent with leukaemia. She knows she is dying and there is nothing anyone can do about it, but in a way hopes that it’s not true and some magical new medical intervention or diet or miracle will make it not true. The last few chapters grow thinner. Paragraphs more spaced out. ‘Moments.’ ‘All gathering together this one.’ Compare this with the jaunty tone of the opening and you’ll have to read on.

    I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he’d look at me in that way boys do in films, as if I’m beautiful.’

    Tessa is, of course, beautiful and she has that old hoary chestnut of a bucket list of things to do before she dies. It includes sex, drugs, and em, getting her mum and dad back together. That’s not initially on her list, but you know adolescent girls, these things change. There’s a clock ticking and all the splendour and resentments of life are distilled and brought to a froth in Tessa’s mangled life. Her best pal Zoey becomes pregnant by one of the boys they pick up in a nightclub. Tessa has sex, but finds romance, true love, with the boy next door. What could be more cliched? But worse than that happens. I find myself agreeing with the Sunday Times.