Happy Birthday to me & Excerpt of Jandy Nelson's The Sky is Everywhere

So yeah...you haven't heard from me in awhile. As most of you know, I was in New York City for a week for Book Expo America last week (which was excellent...I will be recapping as soon as I can steal pictures from my book blogger pals). This week I am visiting dear friends in Ohio. And today's my birthday.

I didn't get my review copy of THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE before I left for the US, so I haven't read it yet, but I've heard wonderful things. Today I have an excerpt of it for all of you who haven't read it yet either. You can read the previous excerpt at Teenage Fiction for All Ages and the next one at Bookalicious Ramblings.

I say softly, “I feel so guilty,” almost hoping the night will suck my words
away before Toby hears.
“I do too,” he whispers back.
“But about
something else too, Toby…”
“What?”
With all the darkness around me, with
my hand in Toby’s, I feel like I can say it. “I feel guilty that I’m still
here…”
“Don’t. Please, Len.”
“But she was always so much … more—”
“No.” He doesn’t let me finish. “She’d hate for you to feel that way.”
“I know.”
And then I blurt out what I’ve forbidden myself to think, let
alone say: “She’s in a coffin, Toby.” I say it so loud, practically shriek it –
the words make me dizzy, claustrophobic, like I need to leap out of my body.
I hear him suck in air. When he speaks, his voice is so weak I barely hear
it over our footsteps. “No, she isn’t.”
I know this too. I know both things
at once.
Toby tightens his grip around my hand.
Once at Flying Man’s,
the sky floods through the opening in the canopy. We sit on a flat rock and the
full moon shines so brightly on the river, the water looks like pure rushing
light.
“How can the world continue to shimmer like this?” I say as I lie
down under a sky drunk with stars.
Toby doesn’t answer, just shakes his head
and lies down next to me, close enough for him to put his arm around me, close
enough for me to put my head on his chest if he did so. But he doesn’t, and I
don’t.
He starts talking then, his soft words dissipating into the night
like smoke. He talks about how Bailey wanted to have the wedding ceremony here
at Flying Man’s so they could jump into the pool after saying their vows. I lean
up on my elbows and can see it as clearly in the moonlight as if I were watching
a movie, can see Bailey in a drenched bright orange wedding dress laughing and
leading the party down the path back to the house, her careless beauty so huge
it had to walk a few paces ahead of her, announcing itself. I see in the movie
of Toby’s words how happy she would have been, and suddenly, I just don’t know
where all that happiness, her happiness, and ours, will go now, and I start to
cry, and then Toby’s face is above mine and his tears are falling onto my cheeks
until I don’t know whose are whose, just know that all that happiness is gone,
and that we are kissing again.

And a poem: