Thank you to Simon and Schuster AU and the awesome mods at Aussie YA Bloggers and Readers for organising this huge buddy read in advance of the release of I Was Here. 
 I read this in one sitting during a rainy afternoon while holidaying at the beach. I was thrilled to be in one of those moods that had me turning the pages so easily after struggling with There Will Be Lies. It flew by so quickly that I didn't hate it, but I also didn't really think about it until I was finished. And because I read it so quickly, my default response was to give it four stars. Thinking about it, though, I need to drop my rating. I've worked out that this wasn't Gayle Forman's writing, which was as good as ever, but it's the characters and parts of the story that the more I think about, the more I have had trouble with. But I didn't hate it either. See the struggle? 
 Cody is reeling from the suicide of her best friend Meg and struggling to understand. Meg had been away at college with a new group of friends while Cody is still in the small town they grew up in and hasn't been a big part of Meg's life lately but Cody thinks she should have seen the signs and is facing the fact that she didn't know Meg as well as she thought. When Cody goes to Meg's college to sort through her things to bring home for Meg's parents and finds an encrypted file on Meg's computer, she grabs hold of the idea that Meg did not merely kill herself. With the help of Meg's ex, Ben, who Cody thinks may be partly responsible, and Meg's roommates, Cody starts to unravel the mystery surrounding Meg's death. 
 I really struggled with Cody. I hated the way she spoke about people - about Meg, about her mum, about Ben, about Meg's roommates. She makes snap judgments about people and really stupid decisions. Although she is driven by grief I am astounded that no one pulled her up on her wild goose chase and feel like Meg's parents could have reined her in - I believe they had no reason to keep from Cody what they did. They should have known that as Meg's best friend Cody would blame herself and/or try to find more answers than what she was given. I know Cody felt like she needed to find justice for her friend but she never considered that there was more to Meg than she thought and inadvertently she made Meg's death about herself. This really annoyed me as I felt Cody was trying to understand the wrong parts of Meg's story. 
 Cody's trouble with handling the loss extended a bit too far, as she does dangerous and reckless things, and then goes and gets herself involved with Meg's ex, who to start with Cody blames for Meg's death. It never felt like a real relationship to me and definitely not a healthy one, and it didn't add anything to the story. They could have been co-investigators/conspirators in the plot to find out what really happened without jumping into bed together, and without the awful declaration by Ben that if Meg hadn't have died, he and Cody wouldn't have gotten together and he can't be sad about that (you, sir, ARE A DOUCHE). Cody starts to live the life Meg was living before she died and becomes obsessed by it all which really started to worry me - it easily could have ended badly for her, she had no idea what she was walking into and was not exactly emotionally stable enough to handle it. And yet she faced no consequences for her very bad decisions. I also felt that without Ben, Cody would have had to learn to stand on her own two feet emotionally and to deal with her own grief, rather than transferring her dependence from Ben to Meg. I would have been more inspired and uplifted had I seen her doing this for herself. 
 Gayle Forman's books always have a high level of readability for me and her writing is just beautiful so it is hard for me to give them bad ratings. I also enjoyed the different take that I Was Here took on suicide and grief, though I could have done without the romance and would have liked to see some consequences for Cody's decisions. I also didn't like the way that Meg's death ended up being brushed away as "she had depression" - and nobody did a damn thing about it. WE NEED MORE PROACTIVITY AROUND THIS PEOPLE. But I shed a couple of tears on the last page, especially the emphasis on those words "I was here" - I liked the impression that they left, the mark they made. The other thing was that Meg, Cody and Ben were all college aged which is an area in literature that is lacking. The way they spoke and acted and did things was realistic and I really appreciated that - Gayle Forman always gets that spot on.