But aren’t the changes throughout your life little deaths as well? Is that five-year-old you in that photograph really you? Do you share something essential? Stead isn’t delving deep into these questions but simply raising points to make kids think. Goldstein, asks, “Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself?” Actual death, she’s saying, is where you change into something other than your own “self” for good.

Let’s get back to that idea that with every new age in your life, you’re an entirely different person than you were before. But while thinking about her ex-best friend and the way things have changed, she may be unable to hide from herself as well as she hides from others. Something terrible has happened and she wants to avoid the blowback. Meanwhile, several months in the future, an unnamed teenager is skipping school. When a wayward selfie throws the friends into a tizzy, it’s all the three can do to keep their promise to one another never to fight. Emily’s been flirting with a cute older soccer player, Tab’s trying to save the world in her way, and now Bridge has become friends with Sherm, a guy she’d never even talked to until this year. It’s their seventh grade year and there are bigger things on their minds. Recently she’s been taking to wearing little black cat ears on her head, but her best friends Emily and Tab don’t mind. Yet Bridge lived and with seemingly no serious repercussions. She skated into the street and got hit by a car, after all. Hard to pin this one down, honestly.īy all logic, Bridge should have died when she was eight years old. Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead has taken what on the surface might look like a fluffy middle school tale of selfies and first loves and turned it into a much more layered discussion of bodies, feminism, the male (and female) gaze, female friendships, relationships, and betrayals.

But if they hadn’t before, they’re about to now. In her 2006 book Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (don’t say you weren’t warned), philosopher Rebecca Goldstein wrote the following passage about the concept of personal identity: “What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be - until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?” In other words, why is the “you” that you were at five the same person as the “you” at thirteen or fourteen? Now I don’t know that a lot of 10-14 year olds spend their days contemplating the philosophical meanings behind their sense of self from one stage of life to another. After much consideration, I think I’m going to begin this review with what has to be the hoity toity-est opening I have ever come up with.

Goodbye stranger by rebecca stead