Book Review: Pack Up the Moon by Kristan Higgins

Pack Up the Moon


by Kristan Higgins
Publication Date June 8, 2021
Published by Penguin
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Goodreads
Genres: Contemporary, Fiction, General, Romance, Women
Pages: 480
Format: eBook

Every month, a letter. That's what Lauren decides to leave her husband when she finds out she's dying. Each month, she gives Josh a letter containing a task to help him face this first year without her, leading him on a heartrending, beautiful, often humorous journey to find happiness again in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins.   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.

My Review:

Pack up the Moon by Kristan Higgins is probably the most beautiful love story I’ve ever read.  The story is beautifully written and is also heart-wrenching, heartwarming, and even hilarious in places.  Reading this book, I’ve used up almost all my emotions, and after the end, I’m exhausted, content, and uplifted.  

Josh and Lauren were happily married for only a year when her diagnosis of a terminal illness drastically changes their life, but not their love for each other.  After Lauren passes away, her best friend Sarah gives Josh a letter from Lauren every month for a year to help him move forward in his life.  These letters give Josh a task, outside of his comfort zone, to help him move on.  

This book is all about the love shared by Josh and Lauren, although we know from the start that Lauren has passed, the window into their love story is so overwhelming, intense, and beautiful, this story will just rip out your heart, and twist it until you have nothing left.  This intense story is littered with Ms. Higgins’s special brand of humor, lightening up the intensity and giving the book a balance that few writers can achieve.  

I read through this book, with a box of tissues nearby, without stopping as the story gripped me and kept me involved until the very end.  This is a story about grief, and moving on, and told in such a way that you feel for each character and go through the pain, and healing with them.  It was a window into how this lovely couple dealt with the news of a terminal illness, and how they learned to give each other the strength to deal with their new life, and the life after the death of one half of this loving couple.  

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a great love story.  

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