Tessa is only 16, and dying of leukemia, but despite the death sentence, she’s determined to make the most of the time she has left to live by accomplishing the list of things she wants do do before she dies. She writes and keeps adding them on the wall of her bedroom. The list includes: having sex, taking drugs, saying yes to everything during a whole day, committing a crime, being famous and so on. Her first sex experience happens with a stranger and it’s so bad she feels terrible. What she really wants is to fall in love, but that doesn’t seem plausible to happen, not even in a million years, and she’s got less than one year. Time swirls when she meets the boy next door, 18-year-old Adam, who has a quite disturbing life story of his own.
They become distant, with the words terminal cancer leaving no chance for them to be, but grow closer as Tessa refuses to be defeated by her illness.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this book and a few that I just couldn’t make sense of. It is realistic and unnervingly emotional, but not with a great profundity.

I couldn’t stand her best friend, Zoey, and mostly I didn’t understand why Tessa still hang out with her ( i would have ditched her a long time ago), but only then did I realize she was the only one of her friends who stuck around until the very end.

I wasn’t so keen about her mother either, she was so absent from her daughter’s life, never around when she most needed a mother, which I have to say made me very angry, but I guess we all deal with things in our own and different ways. Her father, on the other hand, was a rock. He was with her during the whole ordeal, refusing to leave the side of her bed. And, of course, there’s her little brother, Cal, growing up while losing his only sister.

Her boyfriend, Adam, was so kind it broke my heart. They found love and knowing it wasn’t meant to happen, made it last until the end.

This book was touching, heartbreaking and beautifully written. Makes you think about the meaning of life.

"We said we'd be friends.'

He looks confused. 'Yeah.'

I don't want to be.'

There's space between us, and in that space there's darkness. I take another step, so close that we share a breath. The same one. In and out.

Tess,' he says. I know it's a warning, but I don't care.

What's the worst thing that can happen?'

It'll hurt,' he says.

It already hurts.'

He nods very slowly. And it's like there's a hole in time, as if everything stops and in this one minute, where we look at each other so close, is spread out between us. As he leans towards me, I feel a strange warmth filtering through me. I forget that my brain is full of every sad face at every window I've ever passed."