Eighteen-year-old Jane Culvert is a passionate young woman with a knack for making everything seem magical. When she's off her antipsychotic meds, however, she might hear dogs talking, claim to be a ballerina, or take a pair of garden shears to her sister Lily's green beanbag chair. Sixteen-year-old Lily knows the difference between what's real and what's not—or at least thinks she does before Jane is killed by a moving car. Told from alternating perspectives in the time following her death, this searingly emotional novel explores Jane's mental illness and its grip on Lily and her family. Lily leans hard on her tall, skinny, Thoreau-loving, somewhat mystical boyfriend Caleb, who stoically bears the weight of her grief and sense of guilt. Universal themes of sibling rivalry, identity, romantic love and the importance of letting go are well-developed and deliciously riveting. Griffin masterfully weaves the deceased Jane's past and ghostly present into the story, as the line between imagination and reality, life and death, blurs for characters and readers alike in this powerful story. (Fiction. YA)
