Borderline cutesy, but ultimately powerful exploration of grief from a skillful and original new voice.
An abandoned child, a nursing home escapee, and an angry, elderly shut-in make for a unique team in Davis' whimsical and touching debut.
Millie Bird is only 7, though she has already seen her fair share of "Dead Things." The most recent addition to her “Book of Dead Things” is her father. Millie’s mother, who is struggling with her own grief, leaves her beneath a display of women’s underwear in a department store with the instruction to stay put. After spending the night in the store, leaving notes for her Mum and hiding from the security guard, Millie meets up with “Karl the Touch Typist” in the store’s cafe. Eventually, Millie realizes she must disobey her mother’s orders and go looking for her. She arrives home to find it empty and in a state of disarray. While wandering the neighborhood trying to find someone to help her, Millie ends up on the doorstep of perpetually cranky Agatha Pantha, a widow who has sealed herself off within her home. Though Agatha follows a strict schedule, only allowing herself a moment to feel loneliness, the compassion she feels toward Millie forces her to leave her house. Eventually Millie and Agatha meet up with Karl again, and set forth on their journey to find Millie’s mother. Life exists for the young and robust adults in the novel, while children and the elderly essentially become invisible, allowing for a world where a child and an old man can live in a department store with no one noticing and an old woman can be sealed inside her house by overgrown plants. Millie's preoccupation with death is uncomfortable, as are Agatha's and Karl's obsessions with their own mortality and those they have lost, but this circles the central idea of the novel—death is the thing that none of us are willing to face.
Borderline cutesy, but ultimately powerful exploration of grief from a skillful and original new voice.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95468-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
PROFILES
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.
After acing a job interview and accepting a marriage proposal, Dannie Kohan has had the perfect day. That is, until she awakens to find herself five years in the future with a completely different man.
Just one hour in that alternate reality shakes Dannie to her core. After all, highly ambitious Dannie and her boyfriend, David, have plotted out their lives in minute detail, and the sexy man in her dream—was it a dream?—is most certainly not in the script. Serle (The Dinner List, 2018) deftly spins these magical threads into Dannie’s perfectly structured life, leaving not only Dannie, but also the reader wondering whether Dannie time traveled or hallucinated. Her best friend, Bella, would delight in the story given that she thinks Dannie is much too straight-laced, and some spicy dreaming might push Dannie to find someone more passionate than David. Unfortunately, glamorous Bella is in Europe with her latest lover. Ever pragmatic, Dannie consults her therapist, who almost concurs that it was likely a dream, and throws herself into her work. Pleased to have landed the job at a prestigious law firm, Dannie easily loses her worries in litigation. Soon four and a half years have passed with no wedding date set, and Bella is back in the U.S. with a new man in her life. A man who turns out to be literally the man of Dannie’s dream. The sheer fact of Aaron Gregory’s existence forces Dannie to reevaluate her trust in the laws of physics as well as her decision to marry David, a decision that seems less believable with each passing day. And as the architecture of Dannie’s overplanned life disintegrates, Serle twists and twines the remnants of her dream into a surprising future.
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3744-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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