Goodbye Days

The creative arts are a motif that appears throughout the entire book. All of the Sauce Crew boys attended Nashville Arts Academy, and each had a unique talent (comedy for Blake, drawing for Mars, music for Eli, writing for Carver). The author’s decision to give each of the boys a creative talent is useful in allowing the deceased members of Sauce Crew to “live on” after their death. For example, Blake’s YouTube fart pranks are such a defining part of his character that Nana Betsy pulls a fart prank of her own as a farewell video for Blake’s YouTube channel. In a way, Blake, through his art, lives on. Mars’s drawings serve a similar purpose, and his graphic novel The Judge serves the valuable purpose of allowing the character to communicate, even after death, that his father inspired him.

Meanwhile, Eli’s musicality lives on through Jesmyn. The two characters bonded over music, and her ambitions (attending Juilliard) parallel Eli’s (attending the Berklee College of Music). A tangible example of how each of the boys is represented by their art is seen in Eli’s case when his family scatters sand from a sand sculpture he made as a kid at the waterfalls.