Book Review: What Comes After by Joanne Tompkins
July 26, 2023
This book was deeply emotional. I just finished this book a couple hours ago and it is not one that I am going to be obsessing over for weeks to come, but it is a book I will suggest.
It is filled with self discovery, forgiveness, grief, joy, difficult relationships and honesty.
This book takes place in a small town in the Pacific North West that has seen better days. It is a small community where everyone knows everyone and everyone is in everyone’s business. Nothing remarkable happens in this town, that is until a, well liked, teenage boy, named Daniel, goes missing. The whole town turns upside down and then a second teenage boy, his long time best friend name Jonah, is found dead, with a note saying that he killed his best friend and himself.
This story takes place in the months after the boys deaths, with flashbacks to the weeks leading up to it. We watch through the eyes of Daniels father, Issac, Jonah’s journal entry’s on the day of his death and Evangeline, a young woman who came to the area shortly before the boys deaths.
Evangeline has just be abandoned by her mother at 16 and is desperate. She has no money, very little education and no way of supporting herself. When she discovers she is pregnant, she has a new drive to make a better life for herself, if not just for herself, but also for her child. She doesn’t want to end up with her baby in the same situation she has been put in by her own mother.
Issac is quiet and angry. It seems as though all he has left is his dog, Rufus. He misses his son, but what is even more painful, is that the relationship he had with his son the last couple of years had been strained for a number of reasons, one of which being his wife leaving them both. He feels lost and hopeless and like he had lost everything in just a couple of years, until he finds a young woman huddled on the cold, under a tree near the edge of his property no more than 16.
Jonah has discovered an inner darkness that he saw in his father inside of himself. It scares him and we read through his battle with his inner demons. I wont say much mor, but his notes are important.
In these pages, the characters struggle with the relationships they have, and the relationships they want. They grieve the loss of the boys in different ways and discover parts of themselves that they had long since buried deep within. This book is an important read for anyone and everyone. It has a little mystery, a little ghost story, a little romance, a lot of inner turmoil and a lot of understanding things from other peoples point of view.
I highly recommend this thoughtful and deep book.
