DRAGONFLY DOWN

Siblings Laurel and Olive “Ollie” Greenleaf, both 17, arrive from Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a final summer at their family’s Sutton Island compound in Florida, which their mother, the “world’s leading authority on adolescent trauma-related anxiety,” is turning into a therapy center. The night before the center’s opening, Ollie, the more confident sister, takes off her security tracker to sneak out and meet her local beau, George. (The trackers are necessary because their family is hounded by a hate group known as the Defenders of Morality, who murdered the girls’ father 12 years ago.) Laurel broke up with her local boyfriend, Nick, believing that their relationship wouldn’t survive this last summer. Later, she wakes up in a hospital; her mother is in a medically induced coma, and Ollie is presumed to have been incinerated by an explosion at the compound. Although her memory is sketchy, Laurel knows that Ollie was away from the compound at the time, and she later sees signs that her sister is still alive. She deals with skeptical police and center staff, the latter guiding her through therapy exercises that unearth another trauma: Laurel’s guilt about her father’s shooting. Meanwhile, Laurel gains strength to reunite with Nick and solve the mystery. Masters, the author of The Hennessey Lie (2024), crafts an offbeat scenario of media fame: The Greenleaf girls’ births via embryo implantation—their mother gave birth to one of them,and a surrogate carried the other—is revealed to be “the spark that ignited the Defenders of Morality’s hatred of [her] family.” Narrator Laurel also bemoans their publicity-seeking, cause-focused mother “forcing” the sisters to do a “mortifying” tampon commercial when they were 12. Despite this unusual background, Laurel finding her agency is likely to appeal to many teen readers, who will also likely relate to her noting, “It feels good to do something. Why didn’t I do this sooner? Because I trusted the adults in the room.”