WRECKED

A teen copes with post-traumatic stress disorder after the car she is driving home after a party collides with one driven by her brother’s girlfriend, killing her. Sixteen-year-old Anna has not had it particularly easy before now: Her tyrannical father is given to capricious orders and towering rages, and her mother is caring but distant. Before the accident, however, she had been drawing closer to her brother Jack after a period of adolescence-induced hostility, a détente significantly threatened by the event. Frank once again offers a compelling tale of psychological renewal, weaving Anna’s post-accident present-tense narration through with her memories of significant moments in her family’s past. An innovative therapy (a process called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) proves successful for Anna, and by story’s end, she and her family are on the way to healing, albeit some more smoothly than others. Lacking either the searing intensity of America (2002) or the psychological subtlety of Friction (2003), this offering smacks rather more of problem-novel than purely literary effort. Anna’s voice and situation are both entirely genuine—and scarily relevant—however, and both make this a highly worthwhile read. (Fiction. 12+)