I decided to find out how people at school might react if one of the students never came back.

I'm listening to someone give up. Someone I knew—someone I liked. I'm listening... but still, I'm too late.

Every reader is different. There's no book that's inappropriate for every person, but there are people who cannot handle everything.

The young adult literature is relatively new - it just kind of exploded in the 2000s. When I grew up, there weren't bookstores with sections dedicated to teen lit, nor was my generation raised reading books written specifically for us. Because of that, today we still think of books for teens as children's books and so when you write a book that includes sensitive topics, it just seems even more controversial. What's troubling to me about that is these are issues adults know that teens deal with. Not writing about them makes them something we don't, or can't talk about.

Why does it say she has three hundred and twenty friends?" Josh asks. "Who has that many friends?

Maybe you didn't know what people thought of you because they themselves didn't know what they thought of you. Maybe you didn't give us enough to go on, Hannah.

A lot of you cared, just not enough.