Goodbye for Now Audiobook By Laurie Frankel cover art

Goodbye for Now

A Novel

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Goodbye for Now

By: Laurie Frankel
Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
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In the spirit of One Day, comes a fresh and warmhearted love story for the 21st century.

Sometimes the end is just the beginning....

Sam Elling works for an internet dating company, but he still can't get a date. So he creates an algorithm that will match you with your soul mate. Sam meets the love of his life, a coworker named Meredith, but he also gets fired when the company starts losing all their customers to Mr. and Ms. Right.

When Meredith's grandmother, Livvie, dies suddenly, Sam uses his ample free time to create a computer program that will allow Meredith to have one last conversation with her grandmother. Mining from all her correspondence - email, Facebook, Skype, texts - Sam constructs a computer simulation of Livvie who can respond to email or video chat just as if she were still alive. It's not supernatural; it's computer science.

Meredith loves it, and the couple begins to wonder if this is something that could help more people through their grief. And thus, the company RePose is born. The business takes off, but for every person who just wants to say good-bye, there is someone who can't let go.

In the meantime, Sam and Meredith's affection for each other deepens into the kind of love that once tasted, you can't live without. But what if one of them suddenly had to?

This entertaining novel delivers a charming and bittersweet romance, as well as a lump in the throat exploration of the nature of love, loss, and life (both real and computer simulated).

Maybe nothing was meant to last forever, but then again, sometimes love takes on a life of its own.

©2012 Laurie Frankel (P)2012 Random House Audio Contemporary Contemporary Romance Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Romance Science Fiction
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I loved this book for several chapters, then didn't like it at all. I did listen to the end, but it fell flat for me.

Started out great

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I found myself in a book slump recently. Nothing I read seemed to catch my interest. I wanted to read something a bit out of my comfort zone... but not SO far out there that it would lose me.
Enter "Goodbye for Now."
Every now and again, I like a good tearjerker (OK, chick book).
Every now and again, I like to read about hypothetical uses for technology.
But I don't think I've ever seen them together.
I enjoyed this book immensely. It was light enough to be what I needed, but not so light that I was choking on its sweetness. There's raw grief and rough edges and hard truths in these pages.
While Repose, a computer program that allows the living to communicate with the electronic likeness of theirDLOs (dead loved ones), is prominent, this book speaks more of a community of the living. How each one of us brings something unique and special to the table. Technology has immense power, for good or for ill or for better or worse, but it can never replace the living human connections we have. Yes, it's important to mourn and grieve, to say whatever needs to be said, to regret things that didn't need to happen... but it's all part of life. To paraphrase one character, "You can't stop time."

I am normally not a big fan of this narrator - I am unsure why - but he did a very good job with this emotional read.

A Living Community

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What if you never had to say “goodbye” to your loved ones? What if there was a way to stay in communication with them, even after they’re gone? Frankel explores this idea in an ingenious, fantastical way. In Goodbye for Now love and loss meet technology, the internet and the cyber-world head on.

When her grandmother dies, Meredith is devastated. Her boyfriend, Sam, a computer engineer at an on-line dating service who was fired for being too good at his job (he created perfect matches every time), wants to help Meredith cope with the pain of her loss. To do this Sam sets about mining all of the grandmother’s on-line records: email, texts, Facebook and Skype in order to create a computer simulation of the grandmother. With this sort of artificial intelligence version of her grandmother Meredith can “speak” with her whenever she wishes.

Together Meredith and Sam form a business, RePose, that enables others to do the same thing with their dearly departed. But nothing can last for ever, can it? “...ultimately, eventually, we let go. We do this not because we're ready. We do this not because we've mended. We do this not because we've mourned and come to terms and gotten over it and moved on. We never move on. We don't let go so much as lose our grip and fall because remembering is not enough..memory is imperfect. It is full of holes. It is more space than matter, like lace. It is at once sodden with sorrow and desiccated from lack of blood flow, the obvious result of a broken heart. It makes things up in hopeless attempts to comfort itself. It fills fissure with fantasy. It screws shut its eyes and balls up its fists and flings itself to the ground in a kicking, screaming, blind-rage temper tantrum against reality. But mostly,..memory keeps taking on more.”

Well written and thought provoking; a unique, original story. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. Frankel is the author of another book that I loved, This is How It Always Is https://www.instagram.com/p/ByYU_oyhEmi/?igshid=l8f2tkmq5n0f

For more book reviews follow me on Instagram at #emptynestreader and on Goodreads.
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What is you never had to say goodbye

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If you believe every story has already been told, read or listen to this one. It’s so original and while it’s based on tech, it left me thinking about what Covid 19 isolation is doing to all of us. The characters are multi-dimensional and 100% believable and the performance is exceptional.

Truly original

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Loving every thing she has written so looking forward to a long career for her and for us to enjoy

Laurie is now my newest favorite author

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The premise of this 3.5 star book initially interested me; computer programmer Sam Elling creates an algorithm that matches people with their soul mates, but he is fired when it works too well. He uses it to meet his own perfect match, Meredith, but things begin to go awry when Meredith's grandmother dies. In an effort to ease Meredith's grief, Sam uses (misuses?) his programming ability to give Meredith the ability to electronically communicate with her dead grandmother. Sam and Meredith start their company, RePose, to give others who have lost loved ones this ability to communicate with the dead through email, text, and video chats. This is where the book started to verge into slightly creepy for me.

Goodbye for Now is an innovative and original idea, well-written, and did make me think about healthy responses to death, loss, and grief. There is a conversation between Sam and his father towards the end of the book that is simply beautiful; they are discussing pain and how much parents want to protect their children from pain but knowing how impossible that really is. While the idea was interesting and original, the creepiness factor of that idea kept it from being a really great read for me.

Interesting, original, but slightly creepy idea

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I liked this a lot. The storyline is unique and the relationships between the characters were believable. The narrator is great. Loved listening to this at the beach!

Interesting and unique storyline great narrator.

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Great book, a different look at death and computers together. The book really gets you thinking would I have wanted this or would it make things harder to get over.

Not what I expected

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I loved, loved, loved this book. The idea behind it (that you can communicate with someone who has departed) was fresh and new...and had my imagination working overtime. I was so sad that the book had to end.

Just Imagine

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Really I would give it a 3.5. it was good, interesting concept, good characters but it's just not "there". The first Laurie Frankel book I read was This Is How It Always Is and it was SO wonderful. I keep reading her books hoping for that feeling, love and joy and I am not finding it.

Good but not great

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