YOU, ME, AND INFINITY

An anxious teen experiences love, loss, and healing.

Margaret Vittorio is finishing up her junior year in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood, delivering pizzas for her family’s popular restaurant, Papa Angelo’s, which was named after her domineering and occasionally rage-filled father. She experiences a charming, memorable meet-cute with Mars Zevon Rivers in the waiting room of their therapists’ office—“It wasn’t exactly love at first sight; it was more future at first sight”—only to coincidentally deliver a pizza to his family’s houseboat a few weeks later. Then, purely by happenstance, she joins Mars’ stargazing group with her brother Maurice on the night of her prom. Mars’ passion for astronomy, and especially the first interstellar spacecraft, Voyager 1, is endearing, and they fall deeply in love. They have sex for the first time, attend regular concert gigs, and stargaze atop Tiger Mountain. It all comes to an abrupt end when tragedy strikes. The dense, poetic, second-person prose in the form of an extended letter to Mars describes in depth every aspect of Margaret’s feelings throughout a year of mourning as she tries to make sense of his impact on her life through a project inspired by his space obsession. Nuanced descriptions of Margaret’s complicated family life with three older brothers, her battle with anxiety, and her mother’s disordered eating further intensify her grief journey, a relentlessly sad and visceral experience patient readers will appreciate. Main characters present white.

Drenched in emotion and profound grief for a lost first love.