ONE LAST THING BEFORE I GO
SUMMARY
You don’t have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can’t quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down.
So when he learns that his heart requires emergency, lifesaving surgery, Silver makes the radical decision to refuse the operation, choosing instead to use what little time he has left to repair his relationship with Casey, become a better man, and live in the moment, even if that moment isn't destined to last very long. As his exasperated family looks on, Silver grapples with the ultimate question of whether or not his own life is worth saving.
With the wedding looming and both Silver and Casey in crisis, this broken family struggles to come together, only to risk damaging each other even more.
REVIEW
I’ve read
everything Jonathan Tropper has written, from the humorous to the touching, and
yet this book is different from anything else he’s ever written. You can still
tell he’s written it if you’ve read enough of his books. It still centers
around a non-practicing jewish man in his 30s-40s who has screwed up his life
in some way shape of form. It contains humor, touching moments, and leaves the
reader with a sense fulfillment in having read a book that you instantly are
happy you read, and know was not wasted time.
But this book
was different as well. The first fifth of the book is incredibly depressing,
not that Tropper doesn’t usually start off in chaos and sadness, his last book
This is Where I leave you Now takes place with a family sitting shiva for their
deceased father. But this book starts with a depressed, lonely, divorced man
who has lost everything of value to him. His marriage, his daughter’s
respect/love, and his career. He is a man sitting in neutral at the low point
in his life, and has been for years. And it’s not until the book gets about a
fifth of the way in that Tropper begins to lighten the mood with some of his
famous awkward family dynamic humor.
But this humor
almost seems to come to little to late to effectively cut through the sadness
that has already set into the story. Of course, Tropper may be trying something
new, losing some of his telltale witty and awkward situations for a more
serious book about life and death and the effect everyone has on everyone else,
whether they know it or not.
This review may not sound happy and promising, but let me be
clear, I very much loved this book, it is just not what I was expecting. I
would easily recommend it to family and friends and fully plan to, but for
those who are curious and read This is Where I Leave You Now, or Plan B, or
Book of Joe and loved them for their humor and high degree of writing know,
this is incredibly well written, it just wont have you rolling in the aisles.
But it, like its predecessors, will still leave you breathless as it tugs at
your heart strings, making you both sad to see it over, and happy to have
chosen to have read it.
INFO
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Published: August 21, 2012
Price: $26.95
Link to Buy: http://www.amazon.com/One-Last-Thing-Before-Go/dp/0525952365/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345598288&sr=1-1&keywords=jonathan+tropper
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