Saving June (review)

After Harper’s older sister, June, dies of an overdose, Harper decides to get away from home and take June’s ashes to California, helping her sister posthumously realize her dream of moving there. Jake, a mysterious boy at June’s funeral, overhears her planning and offers to drive, so she and her best friend, Laney, join him for a cross-country odyssey from Michigan to San Francisco. While Jake seems to have known a different June than Harper and Laney did, he refuses to divulge information about their relationship. What he does share, however, is his love of music and his friends across the country as they take spontaneous side trips to satisfy Laney’s free-spirited sense of adventure and prolong their time together and away from Harper’s mom. Sandwiched between Jake’s mercurial emotional registers ranging from frosty distance to tender solicitude and Laney’s steadfast love and support, Harper slowly strips away the layers of her grief to their raw core. Harper’s frequent snipes at Christianity, reinforced by the portrayal of her aunt as a bullying believer, set up a subtle thematic contrast between youth and age. Seeking spiritual comfort may be fine for her mother and her aunt, but Harper’s grief work depends on the stubborn embrace of what’s in front of her—first love, sex, music, friendship, the open road, and even disappointment, betrayal, and the struggle for forgiveness, which she finds as Jake ultimately reveals his secret motive for taking her to California. Readers seeking a plausible explanation for June’s suicide will be disappointed, but the weight of the book is carried by Harper’s extended response, which is carefully and sufficiently nuanced to warrant its hopeful resolution.