There Will Come a Time by Carrie Arcos (review)

Everything changed for seventeen-year-old Mark in May, when he and his twin sister, Grace, were hit by a car and she died instantly. Now he’s basically sleepwalking through senior year, avoiding mention of Grace except with Grace’s best friend, Hanna, and resisting his friends’ efforts to involve him more in school and life. When he and Hanna look through Grace’s journals, they find that list-loving Grace had a five-item bucket list, and they decide to honor her by completing the tasks. We’ve seen the bucket-list trope before, but Arcos makes the process realistic (it’s mostly things Grace was afraid of doing, and executing them isn’t in itself particularly epiphanic), and it’s really just a small thread in the larger tapestry of Mark’s punishing sense of grief and loss. Mark is sensitively characterized through his narration as well as description—young Filipino guy with ear plugs and beanie, talented bassist with musical ambitions, lover of LA, and “twinless twin” who can’t come to grips with his new reality. The book effectively captures him as a person who shuts down and gets angry in the face of pain, and a backstory about his mother’s departure from the family plausibly amps up Mark’s sense of abandonment. Ultimately, this is a book about surviving a primal level of heartbreak, and as such it’s a nuanced but thoroughly effective tearjerker in its exploration of Mark’s learning to move forward alone.