The Ballad of Ronan McCoy

Eine herzergreifende Geschichte über Freundschaft, Trauer, das Erwachsenwerden und die Zukunft... ganz klare Leseempfehlung! (Bitte die Taschentücher beim Lesen nicht vergessen... )

What would you do if your best friend in the world suddenly wasn't there anymore? What if he was still alive, just far removed from the person that he used to be, unable to speak or walk or properly function? Ronan loved sports and reading and writing and football and was good in almost every subject, a down to earth kind guy who stepped up for others and he was Brendan's only and best friend. And then he was gone. And in his place was someone who couldn't be any of those things anymore. Brendan learns to love his best friend again, and even though everything is different now, he still wants to be there for him and not give him up. And he won't let anyone but Ronan tell him what he needs or what it was that caused the accident, and since we see everything through Brendan's perspective, we also don't know what happened. I really love that, actually, because so many disabled people get reduced to what happened to them and that book doesn't even give you the chance to do that. Next to Ronan, Brendan also has to juggle the loss of his grandmother (and his mother's grief about it), his looming finals and the end of his school life and his feelings for his classmate Jennifer who suddenly seems to be prettier than any other girl he's ever seen. Both their feelings are awkward and messy, aka realistically portrayed teenagers, but they are so adorable. I also love the little detail that Brendan always slips into a bit more of an Irish accent when he talks to people who have one. So simple but so realistic because I'm sure it happens to all of us. Not with Irish, necessarily, but with accents and dialects. The book also casually drops in a sentence that they would have been 7 in 1993 which means the book takes place in around 2002 and also means the main characters were born around 1986, just like the author himself, so he's literally writing his own experiences down with it and I kinda think it's a great idea because when you're like 40 and writing about school life better don't try to imagine how it would be today but just retell how it was for you. I almost needed a month for this book. It was hard for me to get through some passages; I can read the most maddening horror without flinching but this one broke me. And it also made me feel understood. Grief is something I carry in me, have been for a long time, and I've always found it hard to address it, work through it, pushing it away was easier. I think I worked through a small part of it while reading this book. I think it really helped me.