Goodbye for Now: A Novel (edition 2012)

This book is both hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. Frankel has a crisp writing style and wonderful sense of humor and irony. If it wasn't for the dark, dry humor this would be an awfully depressing book. It is pretty much all about death and grieving after all.

Goodbye For Now raises so many thought-provoking questions in today's social media age. Is chatting and emailing with a DLO (Departed Loved One) that much different from having purely electronic relationships with living people? Should RePose be used just for the short-term as a crutch in the grieving process? Or should it be used long-term as a means of honoring the DLO's memory? Is using it long-term just prolonging the denial stage of grief - perhaps forever?

I'm not sure of the answer to any of these questions but I do know that I enjoyed this book immensely. ( )

Fabulous book even though I guest the ending. Worth the read. ( )

From the book synopsis: "Sam Elling works for an internet dating company, but he still can't get a date. So he creates an algorithm that will match you with your soul mate. Sam meets the love of his life, a coworker named Meredith, but he also gets fired when the company starts losing all their customers to Mr. and Ms. Right.

When Meredith's grandmother, Livvie, dies suddenly, Sam uses his ample free time to create a computer program that will allow Meredith to have one last conversation with her grandmother. Mining from all her correspondence—email, Facebook, Skype, texts—Sam constructs a computer simulation of Livvie who can respond to email or video chat just as if she were still alive. It's not supernatural, it's computer science.

Meredith loves it, and the couple begins to wonder if this is something that could help more people through their grief. And thus, the company RePose is born. The business takes off, but for every person who just wants to say good-bye, there is someone who can't let go.

In the meantime, Sam and Meredith's affection for one another deepens into the kind of love that once tasted, you can't live without. But what if one of them suddenly had to? This entertaining novel, delivers a charming and bittersweet romance as well as a lump in the throat exploration of the nature of love, loss, and life (both real and computer simulated). Maybe nothing was meant to last forever, but then again, sometimes love takes on a life of its own."

I received this book via a bound galley in exchange for a review.

I thought the book was very well-written but it hit a little too close to home for me. I lost my father just around this time last year and the thought of the possibilty of 'talking' to him again via Sam's program made me very sad.

I'm going to try to go back and re-read the book when things are not so raw for me. ( )

Sam works at an online matchmaking site, but he's hopeless at finding the right date for himself. When he writes an algorithm for determining the perfect match, it works so well he gets fired: a dating site doesn't make money if its clients find their match immediately! When Sam runs the algorithm for himself, though, he does find his perfect woman, Meredith. After Meredith's beloved grandmother dies, she's devastated. Sam, now unemployed, spends his time tweaking his program until he creates a system that allows users to communicate with the deceased through email and simulated video chats. Meredith is soothed to no end by the contact with her grandmother, so naturally the concept is taken to the next step and introduced to the public. Summary BPL

This one is on everyone's BEST FICTION OF 2012 list, including mine! It's a roller-coaster ride of true love, true loss, social--real and virtual--networking, algorithms to produce interactive projections of DLOs (dead loved one) and intergenerational community. Intelligently funny, sometimes scaldingly sad, Goodbye for Now asks questions about how social media might propel the evolution of human response to loss and death and concomitant moral concerns. I gobbled it up! Find myself thinking of a film adaptation--I'm not ready to let the story go--but could the producers resist stereotyping the characters: the sassy gay friend; the dotty old lady upstairs; the arty-smarty parents?

WARNING Not suitable for the recently bereaved.

8.5 out of 10 For fans of smart but not vapid contemporary fiction, funny and true enough to get the reader thinking.... ( )

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. I think there is a high chance that this story could have come off as being creepy – but luckily it wasn’t creepy at all. At least to me. I think it was a little freaky, being able to “talk” to dead loved ones is a bit weird. But the more I read the story the more I understood what these people were doing and it became a little less weird. I do think that if we ever see this kind of technology it will create a lot of controversy though. And the book does go into a bit of that controversy and touches on both sides of it. So it was very well-rounded.

I loved the characters – real and otherwise. Sam was a likable guy – like many “nerds” he was often overlooked as boyfriend material. Then he found Meredith. Because they were matched on how well their personalities would mesh rather than how they looked their romance was true. Meredith loved Sam for who he was, not how he looked. And it made for a great romance. Their relationship is the kind that everyone dreams of having. They were truly the perfect fit for each other. They complimented each other so nicely. Where Sam was an introvert Meredith was an extrovert and helped open Sam up. Where Meredith was emotional Sam helped her talk through things and look at the whole picture. If the story had just been about their love it would have been a great story. But there was so much more to this than just being a love story.

The book deals with a controversial issue, and regardless of which side you agree with I think it’s a book worth reading. It really does deal with both sides of the issue – those that don’t think it’s right, and those that do. The premise of the story is that you can talk to your loved ones after they’ve passed if they have a decent amount of online activity to build on. For people who are grieving being able to talk to that loved one just one more time can be the closure they need to move on with their lives. And yet there are those people who keep the lines of communication going for quite a while. Those people who come in looking for communication with their loved ones really become an integral part of the story. They’re sharing something so intimate with each other, and they really do become their own little family. As much as I liked the love story between Sam and Meredith seeing the changing dynamics between the people there to speak with their loved ones was a great addition to the story.

I’ve been seeing that the movie rights for this one have already been picked up. I think that’s awesome. It was a great book and I think it will make an amazing movie. It was wonderfully written, and as long as the screen play doesn’t take too many liberties with the story it will be a great movie. ( )