AFTERMATH

After her brother dies, a girl tries to navigate seventh grade in a new school filled with students who are also coping with trauma.

After Lucy’s 5-year-old brother, Theo, dies from a rare congenital heart condition, her parents, who commute to work in Washington, D.C., decide they need a fresh start. They move from suburban Maryland to Queensland, a fictional Virginia suburb marked by an elementary school shooting four years previously. In the town of 2,500, 32 people were killed; all the children who died were in third grade, and when Lucy arrives, she’s the first new student to join the shattered class. Not only that, her bedroom in the new house belonged to a girl who was a shooting victim. Lucy’s new classmates talk openly and frequently about the shooting, but Lucy plans to keep Theo a secret. While struggling with losing touch with her best friend from home and her parents’ emotional distance, she tentatively befriends Avery, a girl the other students ostracize. Isler’s debut unfortunately feels overwrought, and some plot points strain credulity; for example, in densely populated Northern Virginia, the students from the elementary building that was torn down in the wake of the shooting would have been reassigned to other schools. Additionally, Avery’s journey from pariah to acceptance happens far too smoothly. Lucy and her family are Jewish and, like Avery, read as White.

Lacks the nuance necessary to do justice to this sensitive subject.