a dedication.

I never planned on writing about death and grief when I started writing young adult novels. But here I am, three years later, with thousands of words dedicated to the subjects. 

My best friend Brooke died of breast cancer in 2020, just after I finished the first draft of A Tangle of Dreams. She was one of the first people I told about Gemma and Ollie. I’ll never forget that day at the park, how we sat there watching our children play together just like we’d always talked about when we were kids. How her eyes lit up as I stumbled through my early explanations of the messy plot I was still untangling. I thought she would read my first draft and give me notes. I thought we’d have more time. 

But we didn’t. She was gone only a few months later. And just like that, twenty years of friendship seemed to end.

Losing Brooke changed me; it seeped into it my writing and altered my story. Over the past few years, I’ve learned that you can’t escape grief. You can’t close your eyes and pretend it doesn’t exist or politely ask it to please pack its bags and go away. But you can allow it space in the quiet corners of your heart where it has some room to rest and breathe. Because that’s all grief really wants to do—it wants to remember with you. 

My grief isn’t the same as Gemma’s or Ollie’s or Milo’s or Josephine’s or Aiden’s, but some of my sadness over losing my friend slipped in with theirs. And while my books are pure fiction, the messiness of grief is always a fact. I don’t think these heavy topics need to be avoided, especially in the YA genre. Loss is a universal human experience, and our capacity for handling it is so much bigger than we think it is, no matter our age. 

So I will keep writing and sharing. I will create characters who cry and scream over the injustice of it all, who miss and wish and hurt. We won’t run from the pain. But I will always help them find hope in the healing. And joy—so much joy. 

Because grief and joy go hand in hand. 

This book was written for Brooke,

but it was also written for me and you 

and everyone else 

who has had to say 

goodbye too soon.

Hold on to your magic.

This isn’t the end.