A creatively told tale of emotional and personal growth.
A teenage artist struggles to balance new circumstances with old comforts in Woodburn’s YA novel.
High school sophomore Emma Mason, a talented artist, gets a scholarship to Wabash Academy in Indiana. She’s spent all her life in Buenaventura, California, and has great relationships with her parents; her best friend, Céline, whom she’s known since she was little; and a new boyfriend, Hunter Murray. After starting her junior year at Wabash, she experiences serious growing pains and wonders if her connection to faraway Hunter, which feels “strained and off-kilter,” and to Céline will survive the distance. When a shocking event occurs during Emma’s winter break in Buenaventura, the sensitive painter realizes that she must decide where her loyalties lie. The Before in the title seems to imply that the novel will include accounts of before Emma became Hunter’s girlfriend, but only one chapter, explaining their meet-cute, qualifies as such; it actually refers to Emma’s mindset regarding their relationship before the pivotal event. Woodburn helpfully clarifies this early on, alternating chapters between the Before and After timelines, with the life-altering event as the firm nexus. The After chapters progress chronologically forward while the Before chapters progress in reverse, ending when Emma and Hunter began dating. It’s certainly a clever conceit, and it adds a layer of complexity to the proceedings; however, it also adds a layer of fragmentation that jarringly ricochets the reader between time periods. In this charged tale of teenage romance, friendship, and identity formation, though, Emma’s tone of self-reflection and warm-heartedness keeps everything on track.
A creatively told tale of emotional and personal growth.Pub Date: May 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781958109489
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Owl Hollow Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A taut yet winding mystery that will keep readers guessing.
In this thriller, a flyer on the cheer team at her small-town Texas high school is dragged back into the awful events that claimed her best friend and her boyfriend.
Senior Iris Henley was horrified when her boyfriend, Rocky Koenig, and her former best friend, Lynette Zeiger, were found dead in a presumed murder-suicide the previous school year. She and Lynette, whose drug use was spiraling out of control, had already fallen out, but Iris had no idea Rocky was cheating on her with Lynette. But when anonymous social media posts claim that Iris herself is responsible for their deaths, her life becomes a nightmare of accusations and betrayal. Employing first-person, present-tense narration that feels immediate and anxious, this mystery builds steadily over the course of 25 days during which Iris feels increasingly desperate and unsure whom she can trust. Her troubled relationships with her friends and family are multidimensional and render her a sympathetic and likable narrator, who worries about her own reliability as she was drunk and high the night of the deaths. In particular, a subplot involving Iris’ growing understanding of her younger sister, Noelle, lends emotional depth to this whodunit. The central cast is white, and surnames suggest that some members of the supporting cast are Latine, including Iris’ best friend.
A taut yet winding mystery that will keep readers guessing. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250323835
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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