Sorry for Your Loss

Written by Jessie Ann Foley

Narrated by Ron Butler

From Printz Honor winner and Morris Award finalist Jessie Ann Foley comes a comitragic YA novel that will appeal to fans of Jandy Nelson and Jeff Zentner.

As the youngest of eight, painfully average Pup Flanagan is used to flying under the radar. He’s barely passing his classes. He lets his longtime crush walk all over him. And he’s in no hurry to decide on a college path.

The only person who ever made him think he could be more was his older brother Patrick. But that was before Patrick died suddenly, leaving Pup with a family who won’t talk about it and acquaintances who just keep saying, “sorry for your loss.”

When Pup excels at a photography assignment he thought he’d bomb, things start to come into focus. His dream girl shows her true colors. An unexpected friend exposes Pup to a whole new world, right under his nose.

And the photograph that was supposed to show Pup a way out of his grief ultimately reveals someone else who is still stuck in their own. Someone with a secret regret Pup never could have imagined.

Winner of the 2020-2021 North Star YA Award

Named to YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults List

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062914064

Jessie Ann Foley

Jessie Ann Foley is the Printz Honor–winning author of the YA novels The Carnival at Bray (also a Morris Award finalist), Neighborhood Girls, Sorry for Your Loss, and You Know I’m No Good. For middle graders, she has written Breda's Island and Severe and Unusual Weather. Her work has been named to best-of lists by Kirkus Reviews, ALA Booklist, YALSA, Entertainment Weekly, and many other outlets and has been featured on school and library recommended reading lists all across the United States. Jessie lives with her family in Chicago, where she was born and raised. You can visit her online at jessieannfoley.com.

Reviews for Sorry for Your Loss

[fionaanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Extremely satisfying. Given the themes, this was funnier than I expected.

[heatherlinc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Flanagan clan (all 26 of them) are gripped in the throes of grief and don't know how to move forward. Each mourns Patrick's death in their own way but in isolation, not as a family and it is tearing them apart.

"Sorry For Your Loss" is raw and heartbreaking, and by the end, I was sobbing. I adored Pup, the narrator of this novel and the young of eight. Being the baby of the immediate family he is often ignored and from the first page, I loved him. His voice was real! Gangly, struggling at school but full of untapped potential, Pup wants to bring his broken family back together but is unsure how. My heart bled for him.

I also loved the whole Flanagan family who come together for Sunday dinner EVERY week! They are loud, interfering and messy, and very authentic. I felt their pain and ached for them all, especially Luke who bore an awful secret. The only two characters I disliked were Izzy, Pup's unrequited love interest, and her boyfriend, Brody.

Full of emotion and heart-warming moments, "Sorry For Your Loss" is a poignant, beautifully written novel dealing with loss, guilt, unconditional love and finding your place. A wonderful read!

[iheartya · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As much as I liked the writing, I had a hard time finding the direction of the story, or the point. It was as if the story had an identity crisis. I enjoyed the characters, but some parts were unnecessarily over dramatic and the main character remained out of focus. The end (if you can call it that) was anticlimactic. More of a 2.5 stars, I'm rounding up to 3.