{Release Day Review} Pack Up the Moon by Kristan Higgins (@Kristan_Higgins @BerkleyPub)

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.

​Some might think that Lauren Carlisle Park has a charmed life.  After all, she has a great job, an adoring family, a tight group of devoted friends and she’s married to her soulmate.
 
She might even believe all of that herself – until she finds out that she’s dying. So whatever time she has left, she’s going to cherish it and make sure that everyone around her knows how deeply they are loved. Especially Josh.
 
Her plan is simple.  Each month after she’s gone, he’ll receive a letter.  She’ll remind him to keep on living because true love never dies. 

In love wasn’t a phrase. It was how they lived, wrapped in the warm, soft blanket of mutual adoration, and in this moment, on this evening, nothing else mattered. They were untouchable, golden, immortal. He would love her the rest of his life, and he knew, with absolute certainty, that she would love him the rest of hers. 
​
However long or short a time that would be.

​Joshua Park didn’t really live before he met Lauren. She pulled him out of his shell where everything was monochrome and showed him a world filled with all the vibrant colors love. Now she’s dead at only twenty-eight.  
 
Reading her letters each month is equal parts excruciating and heartening. As much as he can’t imagine a world without her, he makes a promise to face life with as much courage as she had facing death.  He would try. For Lauren. 

Being on his own wasn’t what he wanted anymore. It was too lonely. He didn’t want to revert to that dorky, solitary workaholic Lauren had dated. He wanted to be more. Loving her, and losing her, had changed him, and he didn’t want to go backward.

I can say without a doubt that Pack Up the Moon is Kristan’s finest book yet! From the very beginning, the emotions provoked by her words roll over you in waves.  Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will recognize them instantly – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They are all right there and so tangible that it’s almost breathtaking.
 
The ENTIRE cast of characters is this book will totally steal your heart and make you laugh through all the tears.  And in the end, Kristan leaves you feeling a special kind of hope – the kind that makes the struggle worthwhile…