All Together Now: A Novel

Disappointing ending.... spoiler alert! With the exception of Robbie, these friends are so selfish and so clueless that I found it really hard to like them. The story itself is fine and the author did a wonderful job. I have read previous books by him and I can see the progress that he has made. But the ending! These four people have been friends since they were 15 years old and three of them have such a narrow view that they can't understand their one friend who has tied them all together and provided for them in unbelievably thoughtful ways, wants to die before the cancer makes living so much more unbearable than it already is. They aren't quite ready to say goodbye to their best friend and they thwart his attempt to have say over the way he dies. In my opinion, he should have just taken the morphine and went to bed like he wanted to; however, he makes a last minute decision to end his life in a more spectacular way. Instead of letting Robbie carry out his very carefully laid plans, these three talk him down and make him suffer a horrible death. Robbie flat out told them that he is scared and he does not want to die in some hospital bed wasting away in misery. But that's exactly what his three selfish best friends made him do. They all benefited tremendously from Robbie's success but they couldn't let him die with dignity. I find it extremely selfish and unsympathetic because if a person is scared of cancer taking more and more of themselves away and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives suffering in agony I feel they have every right to die the way they want to. On a different note, the narrator did a good job at bringing this book to life.