Kristan Higgins does it again!
I LOVE her books. In fact, I haven’t read one that disappointed me.
This book takes us on a journey through grief, pain and into acceptance.
I loved it!!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an arc in exchange for my honest opinion.

I always read Kristan Higgins whenever I get a copy of any of her books and review them when they come out on the other platforms. I sometimes forget to review them on here. This was a wonderful book by her as always.

I knew this book was going to be sad, but I wasn't prepared to cry so much and so often. I cared deeply about the characters and their journeys. I loved this book and the emotional ride it took me on.

I'm so used to reading books by Kristan Higgins that leave me with a smile on my face. Yes, some can elicit tears but they are always hopeful. So I was a little shocked to read the blurb of this one. We are told the main character dies!!

Was I going to read it? Yes, absolutely.

Was it going to break my heart? Probably, but I wouldn't pass up the opportunity.

This is the story of Lauren and Josh. A young couple who is happily married. They are lucky, they get along in a fantastic way. Then, Lauren's asthma keeps on making her feel tired and short of breath. She has multiple ER visits and hospital admissions for pneumonia. Then she is sent to the pulmonologist and finally, an accurate diagnosis is made. Lauren has IPF, a terminal disease.

Joshua's world collapses. Despite him being a prodigy in his career, he can't help Lauren. He is completely useless and powerless and losing her, he does. Yet, Lauren is helping him deal with her loss from the GB (great beyond). She left behind a letter for each month of the first year she's gone to help Joshua move on. The tasks are not easy for him to do but in a way they make him move forward despite the pain.

There is no doubt that Kristan Higgins is my favorite author for a reason. Pack Up the Moon is a well-written novel that deals with grief in an honest way. I couldn't feel sadder for Joshua and his heartbreak. Lauren was a little too good for her own good but I will let that go. I did love the secondary characters, Lauren's letters to her dad, the humorous parts of the story, and I thought the epilogue was just what the novel needed.

Thank you KH for making sure my tear ducts are in working order!

Cliffhanger: No

5/5 Fangs

A complimentary copy was provided by Berkley via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book cracked my heart wide open. I’m typing this with swollen eyes and a wobbling chin.

My hope is that if you avoid crying while reading, if you don’t like reading sad novels… That you will open your heart to this one. It’s so much more than sadness, so much more than death. It’s absolutely beautiful and you will fall in love with every single character within these pages.

For fans of P.S. I Love You 🤟, those who enjoy crying while reading, heartfelt love and grief. Higgins tackles IPF a little know disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis where fibers grow in the lungs and make breathing difficult and progressively fatal.

Please make sure you have a Breathe Right strip available when you’re done reading this one. I sure as heck needed one to be able to sleep after I finished. It’ll help you breath after bawling your eyes out. You’re welcome.

SO FREAKING SAD!

Pack Up the Moon is an emotional love story about a woman dying of a terminal illness. This is a story about grief, love, loss, acceptance, and embracing life.

Laura, a 26-year-old space designer, receives the devastating news that she has a terminal illness. Newly married to the love of her life, she is determined to make the most of her final years. To help her husband, Joshua, through the grieving process, she writes letters to him. He will receive one letter per month with a task for Joshua to complete to help him cope.

Through the eyes of Laura, the reader experiences how she deals with the reality that she is dying. She goes through her own grieving process as she faces a life lived too short. At the same time, the reader experiences loss through Joshua’s perspective.

This is not an easy book to read. To say it is emotional is an understatement. I started crying at the 7% mark and continued to cry frequently throughout. There were moments when I was ugly crying, and others when I was crying tears of joy. Thankfully, a lovely, eccentric cast of supporting characters add some much-needed humor, although some of them made me cry too!

Pack Up the Moon is a touching, heartfelt read. It is a sad story with some happy moments. The characters make it worthwhile to read. I saved it for when I needed a good cry, and it got the job done! If you plan on reading this, have tissues handy!

Thank you to Elisha Katz from Berkley for sending me a gifted copy of this book.

Lauren and Josh are the perfect couple and seem to have it all.. Until Lauren finds out she has a terminal illness. It seemed to take forever to find each other and both are devastated of the diagnosis.. who wouldn’t be? how do you live knowing you have very little time left. How do you prepare your loved one for your death. Lauren decides to write a letter a month.. for Josh to read and help him move on.. this is such a heartwarming story.. Kristin Higgins, tells the story of love, loss & moving on.. She seems to be able to touch on all the emotions that would come with the diagnosis. I love how the story went between past and present. We got to learn about the start of their relationship and the years in between. The writing is excellent, the emotions are real.. I really enjoyed this story.. It was definitely sad but it also showed hope.. It also shows how family and friends can help a grieving husband, while they are grieving too… There were even funny points that put a smile on my face.. This book had it all..

Kristan Higgins is one of my favorite authors. Her books are always filled with characters that are overcoming life’s difficulties but I did not expect this one to be such a tear jerker! She captures the stages of grief; both from Lauren who is grieving her diagnosis and her husband who is mourning her loss. Though this book deals with difficult topics and circumstances, Higgins still finds a way to give the characters hope. Though sad, this is still a love story and one I would recommend if you are in need of a good cry.

🥰liked || 💗no steam
🤟sad, hopeful, well written
📚The Two Lives of Lydia Bird, Photos of You
🎶Dancing with Your Ghost by Sasha Sloan

I'm so sorry I'm late with my review, it's just that this one hit home very, very hard for me and while I appreciated the sensitive approach to the loss of a spouse due to incurable disease, I found myself weeping when I knew I wasn't supposed to. However, huge kudos to Kristan Higgins for continuing to tackle tough issues with her always engaging writing and characters. I will always read her books and hopefully her next won't hit quite so painfully hard to home. Thank you for the galley, Berkeley! ❤

Oh my goodness, this book!! I had all the feels.
I didn’t read the synopsis before starting, and when I realized what the book was about, I almost set it aside thinking I have too much emotion in my life currently, but I’m so glad I didn’t.
I loved everything about it—the writing. The characters and interactions and especially the outcome. Beautiful.

If you need a good cry, this book will definitely give you that! It was such a heartbreaking story. I absolutely loved the characters and really felt their pain throughout. The story was a little bit similar to PS I Love You but I was able to still enjoy Pack Up the Moon. The writing was excellent and I’m already looking forward to this author’s next book! I highly recommend this one.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a free advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Kristan Higgins books just have a way of making you feel all the feels and boy, this one is no different. I laughed, I cried (sobbed is probably a better word), and I fell in love with all the characters. Pack Up the Moon is a little bit of a P.S. I Love You plot line but with KH’s own unique spin on it. This one gets four teary eyed, broken hearted, second chance love story stars from me!

Love from the great beyond. Lauren is dying and decides to leave her beloved husband 12 letters to help him through the next year. Josh can barely function after his wife dies but discovers she has left advise and challenges for him in the monthly letters she wrote. This books swings you back and forth between tears and laughter. I always enjoy Kristan Higgins novels. A great gift for friends and family. I received a copy of this ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Kristan Higgins says Pack Up the Moon is "probably the most important book that I've written because it is about life and death and love and loss. I don't believe that you ever recover from a loss. You either become slammed into the earth by it and stuck or you learn how to carry it. And you get stronger and stronger; not that the burden gets lighter but that you get stronger. I wanted to write, almost like a how-to book and how do you get over one of the greatest losses you can experience."

In the hands of a less-skilled writer, Pack Up the Moon could be depressing, sappy or, worse, both. But Higgins elevates the topic into a story that is neither. Rather, Pack Up the Moon, while undeniably gut-wrenching, is charming, poignant, and uplifting.

Higgins employs alternating narratives to effectively tell the story of a young couple who, after a disastrous first meeting several years earlier, run into each other again and instantly click. Lauren was a twenty-six-year-old public space designer who lost her father suddenly when she was just twenty. She writes letters to him as a way to keep him in her life, presented by Higgins in reverse chronological order. The book opens with a missive written on Valentine's Day, just eight days prior to her death at the age of twenty-eight. It begins, "I'm dying, my husband is going to be a widower, and this has been the most wonderful year of my life. How's that for surprising?"

Third-person narratives focused on Joshua or Lauren relate their second meeting, courtship, marriage, and how Lauren's physical symptoms led to the devastating diagnosis: idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a terminal disease with no cure that gradually fills the lungs with scar tissue, choking off the healthy portions of the organs and constricting breathing. Lauren's condition is particularly cruel, not just because it normally strikes much older people and patients have an average life expectancy of three to five years. Joshua is a biomedical engineer who designs medical devices, and he becomes obsessed with either creating a device or finding a drug trial to kill the destructive fibers that will eventually claim his wife's life by depriving her of oxygen. Experimental drugs, Chinese herbs, and an organic diet, combined with a traditional medical approach, failed to slow the disease's progression. Joshua, on the autism spectrum, created and patented a medical device at the age of only eighteen, and sold it for a staggering ten million dollars. But his failure to save his own wife understandably causes him to feel guilt and anger.

In addition to his intellectual prowess and success in his field, Joshua is also handsome and clever, but socially awkward. He fails to pick up social cues and conversation is difficult. But Lauren finds him irresistible and asks him on a date when they meet again at a time when she has matured, largely because of the pain of losing her father and working hard to establish her own career. Higgins portrays a relationship between them that is believable, punctuated with the kind of banter that characterizes intimate partnerships. Lauren encourages Joshua to do things that he finds challenging by lovingly referring to him as "loser." And when Lauren refuses to wallow in despair, pointing out the good things in her life, Joshua quotes Red in The Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living, or get busy dying," to which she replies, "Don't you Shawshank me!" Lauren understands that Joshua tends to be a hermit, completely immersed in his work, and his mind shutters at most social events, so she gently manages him, completely enamored because of his gentle, considerate nature, and self-awareness that causes him to ask her to explain things to him that he fails to perceive or observe. For Joshua, Lauren is a perfect mate -- beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, and thoroughly in love with him, to his unending amazement.

Higgins surrounds Joshua and Lauren with an equally credible cast of supporting characters. Donna is Lauren's self-centered, but loving mother; Stephanie, Joshua's mother, raised him alone after his biological father abandoned both of them when she was pregnant; Jen and Darius, Lauren's sister and brother-in-law, and their two young children mean the world to both Lauren and Joshua; and Sarah, Lauren's best friend, confounds Joshua. He always detected jealousy on Sarah's part -- her dating relationships are always short-lived. But she has been loyal and supportive throughout Lauren's illness, and Lauren even thinks Sarah might be an ideal second wife for Joshua. There is also Radley, the new best friend Joshua acquires because of Lauren's project. Each character loves and cares for Joshua, and helps him accept their affection and support as they prove that they will stand by Joshua and remain in his life even though Lauren is gone.

When Joshua assures Lauren that he will not be all right without her, she knows that she has to complete one more project before she dies, but it does not involve designing a public space. Rather, it's a project she is sure her father would approve. "A person had to plan for the future, after all. Even if she wouldn't be there for it." So she writes twelve letters to Joshua, and asks Sarah to deliver them to him, one per month for the first year following her death. And in those letters, she not only reaffirms her love for Joshua and the life they were able to share oh-so-briefly. She gives him assignments, designed to propel her husband into the next phase of his life, confident that he will do exactly what she asks of him. As the months go by, Joshua must venture out of the house to shop for clothing, invite family and close friends over for dinner, consult a psychic, and buy himself a new bed and couch. As the year progresses, Lauren's directives require increasing amounts of courage because they involve more expansive changes in Joshua's life. The results of Joshua's efforts are frequently hilarious, even, at times, to Joshua. Often, they are heartbreaking. And each month, he discovers more about himself and his abilities. He even makes a couple of new friends. Through Joshua's travails, Higgins credibly illustrates the emotional quagmire he navigates in the wake of Lauren's death. He is angry that Lauren's life was cut short, guilty that he could not save her, frightened by the daunting prospect of living many more years without her, and forced out of his comfort zone -- which is, basically, staying in the condo in the same clothes for days, watching television, and eating unhealthy food he has delivered. But he is determined to honor his late wife's wishes, even though she is no longer physically present to hold him accountable. And that characteristic further endears Joshua to readers.

Through the letters Lauren spent her last days writing, Higgins compassionately demonstrates the depth of Lauren's love for her husband, and her bravery. Higgins strove, through Lauren, to portray a woman who resolves to "say, even though I have a terminal illness and I know my life will be much shorter, I'm going to have the best year ever. I really loved that idea that you can be so full of happiness and joy, without being really sappy, but you can just make that decision of, '"This is the hand that was dealt to me and this is what I'll do with it.'" Pack Up the Moon succeeds in no small measure because Lauren is likable, and her relationship with Joshua credible. Higgins has crafted fully formed, layered characters who are fallible, flawed, and thoroughly human. But earnestly committed to making the needs and happiness of their spouse a priority. Because of that, Higgins compels her readers to mourn Lauren with Joshua . . . and cheer him on as he tackles the increasingly difficult challenges Lauren presents him. Until, at last and inevitably, she releases him to enjoy the rest of his life.

Pack Up the Moon is an entertaining, engrossing, and life-affirming homage to facing adversity with courage and learning how to carry heartbreak. Following a devastating loss, even though the burden does not get lighter, it is possible to grow stronger, especially if, like Joshua, you are supported by someone who loves you unconditionally . . . and forever.

𝐏𝐀𝐂𝐊 𝐔𝐏 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐎𝐍 by Kristan Higgins turned out to be a very unusual choice for me. It’s not often I read pure romance, but that’s exactly what I got with this book. The story centers around Josh who has just lost the love of his life, Lauren, after only three years of marriage. Theirs was a fairytale love story, ended too soon by a devastating disease. Lauren knew her socially awkward husband well, so left him 12 letters, to be delivered monthly. Each tasking him with something designed to move him forward in the grieving process and helping him to be a more active part of the world around him.⁣
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This was all very sweet, designed to pull at the heartstrings, and it worked. Even though I felt like all the love was just too much and the story a little neat and tidy, I still found myself teary on more than one occasion. If you’re a fan of romance, you’ll definitely swoon for 𝘗𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘜𝘱 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘯. If you’re looking for something easy and breezy (as I was), you’ll also enjoy this book. If you’re looking for a story with a lot of depth, you might not be as enamored with this one.

Thanks to Berkley Publishing for the e-galley of this book.

WHY DID I LISTEN TO PACK UP THE MOON BY KRISTAN HIGGINS?
I genuinely love reading books by Kristan Higgins — I’ve followed her pivot from contemporary romance with HQN to women’s fiction with Berkley. For the most part, what she writes I will read. Pack Up The Moon appealed to me because it has a premise that I’ve read before and liked. That premise being when a person dies and leaves behind letters for their spouse a la PS I Love You. I went with the audiobook because I’ve honestly really enjoyed experiencing Higgins’ women’s fiction books via audio. Turns out I also really enjoyed Pack Up The Moon via audio.

WHAT’S THE STORY HERE?
Pack Up The Moon is about Lauren and Josh, a young couple who might as well be perfect. They hardly fight. They work fabulous jobs and are very successful. Things are going so great, that is, until Lauren is diagnosed with a fatal lung disease. Lauren writes Josh a series of letters, one per month, to carry him through the year after she dies. Each letter comes with a task. The book is structured so we read about Josh receiving the letters, coping, and doing what the letters ask. This alternates with chapters providing perspective of Lauren writing the letters and coming to terms with her disease. Along the way Josh learns to lean into his friends and family and eventually find love again.

WHAT DID I THINK OF PACK UP THE MOON BY KRISTAN HIGGINS?
I really LOVED Pack Up The Moon. It hurt my heart, some scenes. I found myself really invested in Lauren and Josh — and even though I know certain things were inevitable, I just kept hoping for a miracle – even though we begin the book with Lauren dead pretty much. What a testament to love though and its transformative power. I wish that Lauren and Josh had gotten longer, but their relationship was beautiful and raw and real. Also, that ending. It was just perfect. I loved how all the threads wove together in the end. Also, loved Josh’s character development and just how much he has to grow and come out of his shell. I think that this just might be my favorite book by Higgins so far. I will absolutely be pursuing a copy for my shelves.

HOW’S THE NARRATION?
The audiobook of Pack Up The Moon has two narrators – Xe Sands and Dion Graham. Xe Sands narrates the chapters from Lauren’s perspective and Dion Graham narrates the chapters from Josh’s perspective. I loved this choice by the audiobook producer to have two narrators. Both Sands and Graham just absolutely nail it. I think because the audiobook was so good that also was such a big factor in my love for this book. If you haven’t read or listened to anything from Kristan Higgins, let this be where you start.

Thank you to Berkley Publishing for my copy of Pack Up The Moon by Kristan Higgins in exchange for my honest review. 

Get your tissues ready for this one. Kristian Higgins has mastered the ability to write a heartbreaking and beautiful love story. I have read a lot of her backlist and this is definitely one of my favorites!

Joshua and Lauren have just celebrated their third wedding anniversary, when she loses her battle to a chronic illness. A while before Lauren dies, comes up with a plan to help her husband grieve and heal. She leaves him letters to be delivered each month after her death. In these letters she gives Joshua instructions and a new task each month, starting small and working up to more life changing ones by the end, that will help him move on from her death and find a new life on his own. 

The timeline was unique and I love that it came full circle. It is written in dual POV and also dual timeline. It alternates from Josh in the present day and going forward in time from Lauren's death, and Lauren in the past going backward from the time of her death. Yes, it was a very sad story and I cried several times. But it was that good kind of sadness, and the story was a healing process. I loved the honesty and rawness of Joshua's grief. And that Lauren's family was still there for Joshua, and they all tried to help each other was heartwarming. Another shining point of the story for me was Joshua's friendship with Radley and the influence he had on him. I was cheering Joshua on as he made all these brave steps and dutifully followed all of Lauren's instructions.

I love Kristan Higgins but I miss the books she wrote in the past that always made me laugh. That being said I really did enjoy this book. It was heartbreaking but had a great story about love and friendships. I really felt for Joshua.

Thank you so much for this ARC! What a cute premise, reminded me of PS I Love You. Unfortunately for me, I actually found some of it quite depressing to read. I had to stop, maybe I will reread at another time.