We recently received a new middle grade fiction book called, Never That Far by Carol Lynch Williams. My daughter snatched it up and decided to read it in two days! She loved it, and I haven’t had a chance to read it, so she is doing this review today!
Book Review:
I really liked this book. It was touching story and very creative. I had recently seen the movie Coco and liked that they were similiar. It was unpredictabe and the characters were fun and learned to like them a lot. It’s definitely one I would recommend to audiences of all ages. I loved how in the book the dead live on after death. I also liked how they talked about God. They don’t talk about religion very much in books anymore and I apreceated that this one did.
Synopsis:
Libby Lochewood is twelve years old when her grampa dies of a heart attack. She is devastated at losing her best friend. Now that he’s passed on, it’s just her and her father, and he is so overcome by grief that he can barely get out of the bed in the morning.
The night of the funeral, though, Grampa’s spirit appears in Libby’s bedroom and tells her three important things: first, that she isn’t alone or forgotten—“The dead ain’t never that far from the living,” he says; second, that she has “the Sight”—the ability to see family members who have died; and three, that there is something special just for her in the lake. Something that could help her and her father—if she can find it.
Libby begins her search along with her friends Bobby and Martha, but it’s hard to know if they’ve found what Grampa wanted her to find since they don’t really know what it is. As Libby’s father falls deeper and deeper into depression, Libby and Grampa work together to help her father believe that their loved ones who had died are much closer than he thinks. But it will take all of Libby’s courage and her gift of Sight to convince her father that the dead are never truly gone.
Set in lush, rural landscape of southern Florida, Never That Far, celebrates friendship, hope, and the power of family love.
