Julie's Review: Pack Up the Moon

Author: Kristin Higgins
Series: None
Publication Date: June 8, 2021
Publisher: Berkley
Pages: 463
Obtained: publisher via NetGalley
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Bottom Line: You know the ending but it'll still get to you; so have those tissues ready
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Grab

Summary: Joshua and Lauren are the perfect couple. Newly married, they're wildly in love, each on a successful and rewarding career path. Then Lauren is diagnosed with a terminal illness. As Lauren's disease progresses, Joshua struggles to make the most of the time he has left with his wife and to come to terms with his future--a future without the only woman he's ever loved. He's so consumed with finding a way to avoid the inevitable ending that he never imagines his life after Lauren. But Lauren has a plan to keep her husband moving forward. A plan hidden in the letters she leaves him. In those letters, one for every month in the year after her death, Lauren leads Joshua on a journey through pain, anger, and denial. It's a journey that will take Joshua from his attempt at a dinner party for family and friends to getting rid of their bed...from a visit with a psychic medium to a kiss with a woman who isn't Lauren. As his grief makes room for laughter and new relationships, Joshua learns Lauren's most valuable lesson: The path to happiness doesn't follow a straight line. Sometimes heartbreaking, often funny, and always uplifting, this novel from New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins illuminates how life's greatest joys are often hiding in plain sight. ~amazon.com 

Review: If you knew you were dying, what would you do to ensure that your spouse, the love of your life, would be ok? Could you and would you write letters for each month for the first year after you are gone? How hard would that be? This is exactly what Lauren Park does for her husband Joshua. 

We are told Joshua and Lauren's love story through both of their eyes. We live through their love story as Lauren writes letters to her dad, through Joshua's life with and after Lauren and then of course the way she continues to love him through her letters.

Lauren has an understanding of her husband that she knows that his response to losing her will be to become a recluse and a workaholic again. She wants more for him so her letters are a way to make him continue to live. It is almost a guide for him and by following his wife's tasks he brings people into his life that he would never have encountered. He also grows his relationships with those people already in his life. 

There are laugh out loud parts, parts where you are sad and in the end you better have that box of kleenex handy. I didn't and I was using my shirt. 

This is a departure from the other Kristan Higgins novels I have read but she wrote it with obvious emotion and research into the terminal illness that Lauren has in the novel. In the end, the take away from the book is to live each day and love each day.