Tag Archives: YA

What She Left Behind – Tracy Bilen

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13040715Sara’s mom finally has a plan to get the two of them out of Dodge – okay, they don’t actually live in Dodge, they live in Scottsfield, a town so small it doesn’t even have traffic lights. Life with Sara’s dad, Ray, an ex-cop cum hardware store owner, has passed the point of impossible and taken a right turn at scary. He’s abusive and a tad on the crazy side considering he still thinks his son, Matt, lives at home. Matt’s dead.

This is what we know at the beginning of Tracy Bilen’s YA novel What She Left Behind. Getting away is a good plan, Sara thinks, until her mother fails to pick her up at the appointed time and place. When she gets home from school her father tells her that her mother was called away on a last minute training course, but every time Sara tries to call her cell it goes straight to voice mail and the duffle bag she’s packed and stowed under her bed, well, that’s been unpacked and everything returned to its place.

Sara was always the invisible one in the family. Her mother and brother took the brunt of Ray’s abuse. Now all eyes are on Sara and she’s desperate to find out what’s happened to her mother and to avoid her father’s ire.

Two boys come to her aid: Zach, her brother’s best friend and Alex Maloy, hot boy from school. Zach knows Sara’s family history; Alex is new on the scene and seems to be interested in Sara, for real, and although Sara likes Alex she also knows there’s no point in pursuing anything with him since she and her mom are leaving…just as soon as her mom returns. He’s cute, though.

I read What She Left Behind in one sitting. Seriously. The plot clicks along at a good clip; Sara is likeable and sympathetic. Ray is one brick short of a chimney. Alex is too-good-to-be-true, but don’t you kinda want that for the girl whose life is pretty much shit.

I’d have no trouble recommending this book to my students.

Two Or Three Things I Forgot To Tell You – Joyce Carol Oates

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I have a love/hate relationship with Joyce Carol Oates. Sometimes I read her and after I’ve settled into the odd rhythm of her writing I think, yeah, that was pretty good (We Were the Mulvaneys; Beasts) and then sometimes I read her work and think, that was a lot of effort for nothing (Rape: A Love Story) and then there’s this time, when I read Two Or Three Things I Forgot To Tell You and about two thirds of the way in I thought, what the hell just happened? 13501407

Merissa Carmichael has just been accepted into Brown, her first Ivy League choice. Merissa, M’rissa to her friends, has it all going on: good students, good athlete, good friend, pretty and popular, but she is also deeply troubled.

…in the little bathroom adjoining her room, with trembling hands – trembling with excitement, anticipation! — opening a drawer beside the sink, and, at the very back of the drawer, seizing the handle of a small but very sharp paring knife – bringing out the knife, and pressing its tip against the inside of her wrist, where the skin was pale and thin…

Nadia Stillinger, Merissa’s friend, “hadn’t a chance of getting into Brown, or any Ivy League university” has her own problems including a father who works too much and a too young step-mother. She’s fat, too, weighing in at a whopping 119 pounds. And everyone knew that  it was “utterly, utterly disgusting to be fat.”

The one thing Nadia and Merissa share is Tink, the child-star who moved to their town of Quaker Heights, New Jersey during their junior year. Tink is a “short, fiery-haired girl” whose  “face was pale and plain, as if it had been scrubbed, and even her freckles looked bleached.” She’s unlike any other girl at Quaker Heights High.  She talks back to teachers, doesn’t give a rat’s ass for fashion and doesn’t even seem all that interested in making friends, which is why the girls in Merissa’s circle so desperately want to fly in Tink’s orbit. She seems fearless. Until she kills herself — which actually happens before the story begins – so much of the story is told in flashback.

Two Or Three Things I Forgot To Tell You  isn’t your average YA novel. First of all, the narrative is  Joyce Carol Oates wacky. The narrator is one of the girls — but not Merissa and not Nadia and not Tink. Lots of personal pronouns, though, like “We were stunned” and  “We laughed because Tink laughed”. Still, the first part of the novel is tightly focused on Merissa and her penchant for cutting and the trauma of her parents’ crumbling marriage. Then, Merissa is abandoned (presumably in a much better emotional place than when we meet her) and the focus switches to Nadia and her problems – mostly to do with an incident at a party and her inappropriate feelings for her kind (and handsome) Science teacher.

You either get used to the way Oates writes or you don’t. This book is rife with parentheses and asides couched in dashes. Perhaps the writing is meant to mimic the frenetic minds of its characters, but whatever the case I read the novel quickly. I can’t say I didn’t like it, but I can’t say I loved it, either. There is potential for discussion because the book is topical and in many ways captures the complicated and fraught time in a young woman’s life just before she is about to step over that imaginary line into adulthood. Sadly, some don’t make it.

And We Stay – Jenny Hubbard

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Sixteen-year-old Emily Beam, the protagonist in Jenny Hubbard’s YA novel And We Stay,  has been whisked away from her home town to attend a boarding school in Massachusetts. It’s midway through Emily’s junior year, an odd time for a student to be starting at The Amherst School for Girls.  Emily just wants to be left alone, though, and she keeps her head down and her cards close to her chest.  It’s clear that she’s suffered some sort of trauma and her parents have decided she will not be returning to her old school to “deal with the whispers and stares and, of course, the memories.”

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Emily settles into life at Amherst as best she can. Her roommate, K.T. is friendly and not too nosey and that’s good because Emily isn’t willing to talk about her life. The most she is willing to divulge is that she’s come from Boston – which isn’t exactly true.

Although she doesn’t want to talk about why she’s started school half way through the year, her story is revealed to the reader in short order: her boyfriend, Paul, has died. The details of his death are revealed through flashbacks and the poetry Emily begins to write, in part, inspired by Emily Dickinson. As it turns out, Dickinson had been a student at Amherst one hundred years before.

Hubbard is clearly a poet. Poetry figured in her first YA novel, Paper Covers Rock, a book I really loved, too. In And We Stay, Emily uses her poetry as a way to try and make sense of the senseless. In her poem “Ashes” she writes:

The same sky that once

held her dreams has stolen

her story. And the stars

will know just

how to tell it:

night after night

over and over.

Slowly, Emily opens herself up to the possibility of recovery and healing, but the journey is not without its difficulties. Hubbard negotiates Emily’s journey with a keen sense of the teenage heart.  Perhaps one might view Emily Dickinson as a plot device, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Poetry is the art of heightened emotion, of making the unknowable knowable and Emily is trying to do just that: make a horrific act something that she can survive – because she can. Because she must.

And We Stay is all the things I want my YA books to be: beautifully written, smart and engaging, emotionally intelligent and a page-turner. The book won several awards and is, in my opinion, deserving of them all.

Highly recommended.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea – April Genevieve Tucholke

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Seventeen-year-old Violet and her twin brother, Luke, live in a crumbling mansion in the town of Echo, somewhere on the coast of the Eastern United States. Their parents are absent, artists traipsing through Europe, so Vi and Luke are left to fend for themselves in the house built by their rich great grandparents. The money is long gone and now the house is no longer “dignified and elegant and great and beautiful.” Vi calls it Citizen Kane, but mostly because her grandmother, Freddie, had given it the nickname. Now Freddie is gone and so is the rest of the money Vi’s parents had left for her and Luke to live off until they returned from Europe. That’s the reason Vi decides to rent the guest house and that’s how River comes into her life. between-the-devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea

He was not tall – less than six feet, maybe – and he was strong, and lean. He had thick, dark brown hair, which was wavy and parted at the side…until the sea wind lifted it and blew it across his forehead and tangled it all up. I liked his face on sight.

River’s arrival shakes things up for Vi. She’s an introspective girl, prone to solitude and tucking herself away with a volume of Nathaniel Hawthorn short stories. Her one friend, Sunshine (the daughter of hippies who live down the road) is more a friend of proximity than anything else.

April Genevieve Tucholke’s YA novel Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a strange hybrid of gothic romance and suspense thriller. Although Vi is naive, she’s no – wait for it – shrinking violet. River’s just about the most exciting thing to happen in Echo in her whole life. The problem is that shortly after his arrival strange things start to happen. For one thing, a little girl goes missing and children in town claim to have seen the devil. Then the town drunk slits his own throat, in broad day-light, in the town square. Then River’s brother, Neely, shows up and Vi discovers that River has a tendency to lie about just about everything.

There are some truly creepy moments in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and, like Vi, you’ll be conflicted about River’s motives and actions. I don’t want to say too much about what’s going on because it’ll be more fun if you find out for yourself. Let’s just say, there’s some nasty energy in Echo and this book has a kick-ass denouement. There is a second book, Between the Spark and the Burn and according to Tucholke there are no plans for a third (praise the book gods!) so I will probably purchase the second book just to see what happens.

Lovely writing and page-turning fun makes Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea a winner.

Night School – C.J. Daugherty

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Over 400 pages and I read them all lickety-split. C.J. Daugherty’s YA novel Night School is so much fun! Even when I discovered – about half way in – that the book is the first in a series (and you know how I feel about series), even then…I had to keep reading. (I don’t really have anything personal against series. It’s just that it’s such a commitment of reading time and that’s in short supply in my reading world. Still, as soon as I finished the book, I had to go online to see whether the sequel(s) was out. Um. There are four more books, people!)

Sixteen-year-old Allie Sheridan is always in trouble these days. She used to be a good kid, but then her older brother, Christopher, disappeared under extremely mysterious circumstances, and Allie’s been hanging with losers, defacing school property and just generally getting into trouble ever since. Finally her parents can’t take it anymore and decide to send her to Cimmeria Academy, an elite private school in the middle of the English countryside.

Night_SchoolThere – cut off from the outside world (no technology allowed) – she meets Isabelle, the school’s headmistress, and a cast of intriguing teenagers, among them Sylvain, gorgeous and French; Katie, the snotty rich girl; down-to-earth, Jo and Carter West, he of the endless brown eyes and bad reputation. They are all staying on at Cimmeria for the summer term. (School breaks up about mid-July in England and then goes back after Labour Day, early September…so about a six week break.)

Allie soon falls into the school’s rhythms and discovers that she kind of likes it at Cimmeria. Jo is nice and Sylvain is paying special attention to her. The food is great and the school is beautiful.  What’s not to like?

Well, first of all there’s ‘Night School’, but like ‘fight club’ – you’re not supposed to talk about it.

Students in certain advanced areas of study take part in Night School to prepare them for life after Cimmeria so you will sometimes hear them working late in the evening. Only very few select students are offered this opportunity; if you are not among them, you must not attempt to interfere with or observe Night School, and the fourth floor of the class-room wing is off limits.

Then there’s the woods though, according to Jo,  “we don’t actually do much in the woods, and they kind of discourage it because of, I dunno, health and safety or something.”  Then there’s Carter’s cryptic warning: “You haven’t been at Cimmeria long enough to understand how things are here. So be careful, okay? Things are not what they seem. People aren’t always who they seem to be.”

And I still had 200 pages to go!

There are creepy moments aplenty in Night School. Intrigue galore. And even if the payoff isn’t quite there, there’s more than enough to keep readers turning the pages. I would definitely be interested in reading the next book in the series, Legacy, to see how Allie makes out.

My only other niggle is that the characters don’t sound British. The occasional ‘blimey’ thrown into their dialogue does not a British accent make. They sounded decidedly American to me, which stands to reason: Daugherty is from New Orleans, though she now lives in England. That’s a small thing, though, and in no way undermined my overall reading experience.

Fun, fun, fun!

The Replacement – Brenna Yovanoff

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Brenna Yovanoff’s YA novel The Replacement is quite unlike anything I have read before, which is a good thing. It was well-reviewed when it debuted in 2010 and I have been wanting to read it for a while. I was particularly intrigued by the cover, which is creepy, although I try not to chose books based on their cover alone – that has lead me down a few crap book paths.

Gentry isn’t like other places and Mackie isn’t like other 16-year-olds. He’s a replacement,  left in the crib of a human baby who was spirited away by the strange inhabitants of the the labyrinthine world beneath Gentry.

7507908Mackie lives with his older sister, Emma and his parents. He has a best friend, Roswell. He has a crush on a pretty girl, Alice. But he also can’t abide blood. Or get close to anything made of stainless steel. Or go to church, even though his father is a preacher.

Mackie knows he is different. “I dream of fields,” he says, “dark tunnels, but nothing is clear. I dream that a dark shape puts me in the crib, puts a hand over my mouth, and whispers in my ear. Shh, it says. And, Wait. “

The way his sister tells it, someone took her real brother in the middle of the night when she was four years old.

When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother.

When the little sister of Mackie’s classmate, Tate,  goes missing, Mackie is forced to confront his own origin story and this leads him the The House of Mayhem and The Morrigan, a girl who rules there and whose “jagged teeth and tiny size made her seem more implausible, more impossible than all the rest.” All the rest of what, you might ask? Yeah, that would be the living dead girls. The Morrigan  tells him “We were so pleased that you survived childhood. Castoffs generally don’t.”

When Tate asks for Mackie’s help, he is reluctant; he’s got his own problems. But when The Morrigan offers to help Mackie feel better even he can’t resist. There is a strange barter system between Mayhem and Gentry: Mayhem thrives on adulation. But Mayhem isn’t the only world beneath the town. The Morrigan has a sister, and she thrives on blood sacrifice.

Mackie doesn’t fit in, but  whether or not Yovanoff meant for his journey to be a metaphor (like Joss Whedon’s monsters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) hardly matters because The Replacement is a thrill ride.

Great book.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock – Matthew Quick

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forgive meToday is Leonard Peacock’s 18th birthday. It’s also the day he has elected to kill himself – but first he has to kill his former best friend, Asher Beal.  Before he can do that, though, he has some gifts to deliver, gifts he’s wrapped in pink paper and packed in his knapsack along with his grandfather’s P-38 WWII handgun.

I want to give them each something to remember me by. To let them know I really cared about them and I’m sorry I couldn’t be more than I was  – that I couldn’t stick around – and that what’s going to happen today isn’t their fault.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock is a smart, funny, heartbreaking novel by Matthew Quick, perhaps better known for Silver Linings Playbook. I was immediately enchanted by Leonard’s charming, wry and honest narrative — he is immediately believable and sympathetic.

Leonard isn’t your run-of-the-mill teenager. He’s a thinker. He’s also in real emotional distress. It’s no wonder. His father, a former rock star currently on the run from the IRS, and his mother, a fashion designer who lives in NYC with her French boyfriend, are clearly terrible parents.

As Leonard makes his way through his day and we meet the four people he deems worthy of parting gifts, it’s easy to see how lonely and isolated he is.

First there’s Walt, the old man who lives next door. “I met Walt during a blizzard” Leonard tells us in one of the novel’s frequent (and often caustic) footnotes. Leonard’s mother, Linda, had asked him to go “shovel the driveway, even though it was still snowing, because she had to go out to meet another fake designer or some bulimic model.” Walt is an old movie aficionado and soon enough he and Leonard are quoting Bogart and Bacall back and forth at each other.

Then there’s Baback, a kid Leonard has known since grade nine. When Leonard discovers that Baback is an extremely talented violinist, he bribes Baback to let him sit and listen because listening to Baback play is “by far the best part of my day.”

Then there’s Lauren, the home-schooled Christian who hands out pamphlets at the train station. (Sometimes Leonard rides the train into the city, following random adults to see whether there is, in fact, any potential for happiness once you’re out of high school.) That’s where he first sees Lauren and he dreams of kissing her, although they can’t seem to overcome the obstacle in their way: Jesus.

Finally, there’s Herr Silverman, Leonard’s favourite teacher. Herr Silverman encourages his students to think for themselves, a quality Leonard feels is lacking in other faculty members. Also,

There have been days when Herr Silverman was the only person to look me in the eye.

The only person all day long.

It’s a simple thing, but simple things matter.

I’m a teacher; that hit me in the gut.

Leonard goes through his day, hinting at something horrible that happened between him and Asher, the something that necessitates his rash decision to end both their lives. With each gift, he half hopes someone will notice that something is wrong and, thankfully, someone does.

For anyone who has ever felt ‘other’, for anyone who ever considered ending their own life, for anyone who has ever felt neglected, unseen, or desperate, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock is the book for you.

Highly recommended.

That’s amore

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Listen here.

Boy meets girl – it’s the oldest story in the book, right? And now, thankfully for modern readers, we can also add boy meets boy and girl meets girl (and they meets they etc etc)

A couple of years ago I talked about love and the sorts of stories that make my heart skip a beat, or more often than not, break…a feeling I have to admitting I like just a little more than is probably healthy. You can read about what I said here.

I am a romantic at heart. Sappy, even. I’m not sure I grew up believing that a handsome prince was going to ride in on his white stallion and save me, but I did believe in happily-ever-after, although I am currently on the fence about that now.

My most favourite kind of love story is the one where the couple overcomes tremendous obstacles to be together – sacrifices are made – or, even better, that they love each other deeply but just can’t be together. Angst, baby. Buffy and Angel. Hello.

So since Valentine’s Day has just passed, I thought I would talk about romantic books.

I cut my teeth on my mom’s bodice rippers – Rosemary Rogers type stuff. Sweet Savage Love. You know, wild men who can’t be tamed and the virginal women who tame them.

Clearly romance novels have changed over the years – like 40 of them – when I first starting reading them. Some argue that modern romance novels are actually empowering because they are mostly written by women for women, women are generally the hero – or should I say heroine – of the piece and then there’s the s-e-x. In the modern romance novel, women are often in charge of their own pleasure, something I doubt Rosemary Rogers would have acknowledged back in the day.

All that said – I still have a soft spot for romance between two people who have to overcome horrible odds…and if they can’t actually overcome them – even better. Clearly, I have a type and it’s all about the doomed love. I am the person who still blubbers like a baby watching Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

Ultimately, though, I think there should — at the very least– be the potential for a happy ending, even if it never actually happens.

So, if you are feeling the love – or you want to feel the love – or, you just want to curl up in a ball and cry…I have some recommendations for you.

The Lost Garden – Helen Humphreys lostgarden

Humphreys is a Canadian writer and The Lost Garden is the story of Gwen Davis a young horticulturist in 1941 London. She gets a job leading a team of Land Girls at a neglected estate in Devon. They’re going to be growing crops for the war effort. While there she meets Raley, a Canadian officer waiting to be posted to the front. She also befriends Jane, a young woman whose fiancé is MIA. From these two people – in these fraught circumstances, Jane comes to understand the meaning of love. I was so enchanted with this book that when I was in England in 2007, my kids and I spent the day at The Lost Gardens of Heligan, an estate which is very much like the one Gwen works on in the novel.

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Can I just share a little bit from the beginning of the book?

We walk the streets of London. It is seven years ago. We didn’t meet, but we are together. This is real. This is a book, dusty from the top shelf of a library in Mayfair. The drowned sound of life under all that ink, restless waves breaking on this reading shore. Where I wait for you. I do. In a moment. In a word. Here on the street IMG_0846corner. Here on this page.

But it is shutting down, all around me, even now, this moment that I stopped. The story disappears as I speak it. Each word a small flame I have lit for you, above this darkened street.

The Lost Garden is a really lovely, and surprising love story.

So, I asked my eighteen-year-old daughter why she reads romance. She was pretty quick to point out that most of the love stories she reads are unrealistic and that she realizes that. However, that doesn’t get in the way of her enjoyment. She counts books like John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook or The Last Song among her favourites. Nicholas Sparks definitely offers readers a heaping helping of schmaltz.

If you’re looking for schmaltz, you can’t go wrong with Robert James Waller’s 1992 novel The Bridges of Madison BridgesOfMadisonCountyCounty. You could read this book in an afternoon; it’s short. I don’t mean to suggest that Waller is a wordsmith, but this book broke my heart when I first read it. Francesca is a war bride and she lives with her husband and her kids on a farm in Iowa and one afternoon – while her family is away at a state fair or something — she meets a photographer named Robert who is in the area to photograph covered bridges. The encounter changes her life and his, too. Sacrifices must be made. Their story is discovered by her adult children after her death and they are shocked to realize their mother was more than the woman who made their meals and washed their clothes. People might know the movie with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and it’s a decent version, but the book is pretty good if you have a couple hours and a box of Kleenex.

So clearly, I’ve just outed myself – if a book can make me cry the writing doesn’t even have to be stellar.

Now – how about a YA romance?

easyEasy – Tammara Webber

This is for mature teens…it kind of just crosses the line, but it’s about a second-year university student named Jacqueline who has just been dumped by her boyfriend. She meets Lucas and he’s — I suppose – the proverbial bad boy, but he’s not really. This book hit all my guilty pleasures and then some. There’s tension galore, there’s a likeable minor cast and the two main characters are smart and kind and when they finally reach their happily ever after, you’ll be swooning.

Yep – there’s something super satisfying about a love story. Check out these:

The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

I cried so hard when I read this book, I couldn’t even see the pages.

The Banquet – Carolyn Slaughter

Henry meets Blossom at Marks & Spencer. He’s a conservative architect; she’s a young shop girl. There’s is an all-consuming love affair. Carolyn Slaughter is one of my all-time favourite writers.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Two boys, true love. So beautiful and life-affirming.

Me Before You – JoJo Moyes

Just in time for the movie. Plain Jane meets handsome paraplegic.

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

My first-ever romance. And you never forget your first, right?

What’s your favourite romance novel?

Jumpstart the World – Catherine Ryan Hyde

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When Elle’s mother’s boyfriend decides he doesn’t like her, Elle’s mother sets her up in an apartment across town. The town happens to be New York and Elle is just 16.  Catherine Ryan Hyde takes an almost unbelievable premise (like, what mother turns her kid out because she wants to placate her boyfriend?) and spins it into the beautiful and moving coming-of-age story Jumpstart the World.

jumpstartOn moving-in day, Elle meets Frank Killborne, her next door neighbour.

He had a big, friendly smile and there was something cute about him, but in a soft sort of way. Hard to explain what I mean by soft. Gentle, I guess I mean. He made you try not to find fault with him for some reason. The kind of guy it’s hard not to like.

Frank lives with his girlfriend, Molly, and it doesn’t take long for them to become Elle’s de facto family. It also doesn’t take long for Elle to develop more complicated feelings about Frank.

Jumpstart the World is populated with other interesting and sympathetic characters, too, particularly the group of friends Elle makes at her new school. There’s Shane aka Larissa, blue-haired and gay; the Two Bobs – a gay couple; there’s Wilbur, a quiet guy who wears make-up.  These friends have varying degrees of influence on Elle’s life and are also responsible for the novel’s conflict. When they meet Frank,  they point out what is not obvious to Elle: Frank is transgender.

It’s pretty remarkable that there’s a book like this available for teens. It’s the first book I’ve ever read featuring a transgender character, but the fact that Frank is doesn’t mean that Ryan Hyde starts to get all preachy. We might expect that since this story takes place in NYC, the world is filled with individuals ready to embrace everyone’s differences, but – of course – the world isn’t quite so open-minded and, as it turns out, Elle has some reconciling of her own to do.

Jumpstart the World actually tackles the questions of trust and family and what it means to give your friendship and love to another human being, regardless of their sexual orientation. There aren’t any easy answers in life and it might be a bit much to expect a teenager to figure them out, but each of the characters in this book have had their own life-altering experiences. And interestingly, Elle’s journey – painful as it is – also helps her to make a kind of peace with her mother.

I enjoyed this book. I liked spending time with Elle. I appreciated that her journey was a little left of center, but that she discovered – as she does with her cat, Toto, that sometimes “you just have to take a deep breath and let somebody love you.”

Highly recommended.

 

What We Lost – Sara Zarr

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whatwelost“The whole world is wilting,” says fifteen-year-old Samara (Sam), the protagonist of Sara Zarr’s YA novel What We Lost.

She means the comment literally because it’s so hot that she wakes up every couple of hours “in a puddle of sweat,” but the observation is also figurative. Sam’s life is full of conflict and chaos. Her father, Charlie,  a pastor at the local church, is distracted and every day Sam wakes up to something “ruined or broken or falling apart.”

Part of the problem is that Sam’s mother is currently residing at the New Beginnings Recovery Center in an effort to get sober. Without her mother there, Sam feels adrift. There’s not enough money and Sam is tired of having to pretend that her mom just isn’t feeling well enough to attend church or other social functions. Things get even more complicated when Jody, a thirteen-year-old member of Sam’s church, goes missing  and Sam’s small town suddenly becomes a lens through which she is able to see all the world’s flaws, including her own.

I’ve read Zarr’s fantastic book Story of a Girl and her novel Roomies, which she co-wrote with Tara Altebrando, and which I also loved. Zarr has a real gift when it comes to creating empathetic characters and Samara is no different. Her fifteenth summer is a perfect storm of angst and confusion, suspicion and alienation.

I wish I understood what happened between then and now. I wish there was a way to put your finger on the map of life and trace backwards, to figure out exactly when things had changed so much…

As the town searches for Jody, Sam’s dad spends time with her family, acting as a sort of spokesperson. During this time, Sam grows closer to Jody’s older brother, Nick. He “could probably be a model” Sam observes, studying him the way “every girl who has ever known Nick has studied him.”

The problem with their blossoming friendship is that Nick is a suspect in the disappearance of his sister and Charlie doesn’t want Sam to hang out with him. Charlie also doesn’t want Sam to be alone; the town no longer feels safe. Sam is shuttled back and forth between her house and her best friend Vanessa’s. Sam has suspicions of her own; she wonders why her dad is spending so much time with Erin, the church’s youth group leader.

Zarr manages all these threads beautifully, allowing Sam her questions  about her faith in God,  suspicions about her dad, loneliness for her mom and feelings for Nick to percolate under the hot summer sun.

Great read.