ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE

A young American woman with the power of premonition seeks answers about her father in England in Hawkins’ YA novel.

Teenage Josephine “Jo” Bryantgrieves her musician father’s death by suicide, feeling emotionally unmoored and having many questions. Therapy and medications don’t help her, and she pulls away from her mother and her friends. However, she also begins to have vivid premonitions that often come true. When she dreams of seeing her father in London, where he lived, she knows she must go there. Jo gets the opportunity to do so the summer before her senior year of high school, and there, she finds an ally in a young man named Henry who’s on his own quest to communicate with the dead, using spiritual ley lines to locate places that are “windows between the past and present.” Jo eventually finds many answers, but they’re not the ones that she was expecting. Hawkins wisely allows Jo to tell her own story, but she also includes text threads between Jo and loved ones back home, which effectively allows those characters to speak for themselves. Jo is a Beatles fan largely because her father performed in a Fab Four cover band, and Hawkins nicely weaves musical material into the story; Jo visits many fan sites, even traveling to Liverpool, and the novel and its chapters are named for relevant Beatles lyrics or song titles. The story doesn’t go down like a fizzy pop song though; its feel is more Revolver than Meet the Beatles. Although it’s unquestionably a romance, and some of the twists are humorous, much of the story hangs on betrayal and emotional abuse. Jo’s struggles to overcome and understand what’s happened in her life are moving and realistic, if a bit dark. Although many issues are deftly left unresolved, ultimately readers will feel satisfied.

An imaginative, if sobering tale of young self-discovery and the emotional power of music.