71 pages • 2 hours read
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, death by suicide, graphic violence, substance use, and physical abuse.
In The Best of Friends, the loss of a child, with all its life-shattering upheavals, is surveyed from three distinct perspectives. Kendra, the novel’s first narrator, grapples with an almost inconceivable tragedy: the shooting death of 16-year-old Sawyer, her “favorite” son. Meanwhile, Jacob, the son of Lindsey, the second narrator, hovers in a coma, tempting his parents with illusions of hope. Caleb, the third teen involved in the shooting, has escaped physical injury or death but becomes a silent or sobbing shell of his former self, unable or unwilling to tell anyone what he saw or did. Caleb’s possible culpability in the shooting also puts him at risk of imprisonment; as Dani mourns to herself, “Caleb won’t survive jail” (37). But whatever the judicial outcome, Caleb’s firsthand witness of his best friends’ life-ending injuries has undoubtedly scarred him for life, as it has all the families. Berry focuses on how trauma fractures identity for the parents, who each respond to loss by clinging to rituals and objects that anchor them to the world that existed before.
Kendra grieves the hardest, cocooning herself in Sawyer’s bedroom for much of the day and night, “inhaling him” through his unlaundered clothes and bedsheets, which she has forbidden her family to wash.
By Lucinda Berry
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