Author Description

For Carrie Destin, a military brat growing up around the world, home is never where you left it. When she learns the injuries she sustained in a car accident will prove fatal before she reaches adulthood, she faces her abbreviated life with a brash attitude and a biting, sometimes morbid sense of humor, racing to experience life before it ends. WINNER: Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, Fall 2015 -- Best Book in Fiction "I'm still marveling at what an impressive and enjoyable book this is, and I'm looking forward to reading anything by Grindstaff that I can get my hands on....most highly recommended." Readers' Favorite Book Reviews Facing her own mortality, Carrie accelerates her life and sets aggressive goals: college, connecting with her Japanese roots, and the all-consuming desire to find her soul mate. A kid from nowhere, she travels the world with her Marine father and Japanese mother. She races to graduate high school at age fifteen. College is her marker of adulthood, when she can smoke in public and order dessert before dinner. She tosses out her adolescent wedding scrapbook for a funeral plan. A teenage crush on Paul, a family friend and a widower seventeen years her senior, develops into a fantasy that takes on a life of its own. As she outlives the original prognosis into her early twenties, her life goals evolve--always short-term. The longing for love stays constant, yet she walls herself off from others. Relationships end in betrayal, abandonment and violence. When love reveals itself, she pulls away, fearing that an early meeting with Death is on the horizon. Carrie's frantic desire to experience life before it ends spirals out of control, leading to a physical and emotional collapse. Her grandmother's wisdom points her toward acceptance, but first she must break through her walls before she can give the gift of 'til-death-do-us-part. "The ending was not what I expected, and I put the book down still in tear