For Carrie Destin, a military brat growing up around the world, home is never where you left it. When she learns the injuries she sustained in a car accident will prove fatal before she reaches adulthood, she faces her abbreviated life with a brash attitude and a biting, sometimes morbid sense of humor, racing to experience life before it ends.
WINNER: Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, Fall 2015 -- Best Book in Fiction
"I'm still marveling at what an impressive and enjoyable book this is, and I'm looking forward to reading anything by Grindstaff that I can get my hands on. ...most highly recommended." Readers' Favorite Book Reviews
Facing her own mortality, Carrie accelerates her life and sets aggressive goals: college, connecting with her Japanese roots, and the all-consuming desire to find her soul mate. A kid from nowhere, she travels the world with her Marine father and Japanese mother.
She races to graduate high school at age fifteen. College is her marker of adulthood, when she can smoke in public and order dessert before dinner. She tosses out her adolescent wedding scrapbook for a funeral plan. A teenage crush on Paul, a family friend and a widower seventeen years her senior, develops into a fantasy that takes on a life of its own.
As she outlives the original prognosis into her early twenties, her life goals evolve--always short-term. The longing for love stays constant, yet she walls herself off from others. Relationships end in betrayal, abandonment and violence. When love reveals itself, she pulls away, fearing that an early meeting with Death is on the horizon.
Carrie's frantic desire to experience life before it ends spirals out of control, leading to a physical and emotional collapse. Her grandmother's wisdom points her toward acceptance, but first she must break through her walls before she can give the gift of 'til-death-do-us-part.
"The ending was not what I expected, and I put the book down still in tears. This is a beautiful book and I can't recommend it highly enough. Any book that has me laughing out loud one minute and in tears the next (on public transportation no less!) is a must read." Tamra Reynolds
[Literary, Coming-of-Age, Women's, Southern Fiction]
Evolved Publishing presents the unique voice and soul of a girl facing extraordinary circumstances, this one struggling with the almost unthinkable at such a young age--her own mortality. [DRM-Free]
Books by Robb Grindstaff:
- Carry Me Away
- Hannah's Voice
- Turning Trixie (Coming Late 2018)
More Great Literary Fiction from Evolved Publishing:
- The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky by David Litwack
- Yours to Keep or Throw Aside by E.D. Martin
- White Chalk by P.K. Tyler
- Desert Rice by Angela Scott
