AND THEN EVERYTHING UNRAVELED

Everything unravels for Delia when her mother, T.K., disappears while on an environmental mission. Since everyone assumes T.K. is dead, Delia is shipped from Palo Alto to New York City to live with her aunts, virtual strangers. She adapts to life in New York fairly well, making a good friend and even attracting a hot boy with a dark family secret. On her own, she researches possible reasons for her mother’s disappearance, refusing to accept the simple explanations adults give her. What follows is part family drama, part environmental mystery. To find out what happened to her mother, Delia does a little Googling and a lot of relying on a techie friend. Neither the new-girl-in-town nor the disappearance story line is developed very well, though, and the mystery comes to a quick, easy resolution. The secondary teen characters are one-dimensional, and Delia lacks charm. Delia’s aunts, however, resemble something out of a Polly Horvath novel, quirky yet good at heart. Ultimately, chick-lit readers will be bored by the mystery, and mystery readers are unlikely to be captured by Delia’s story. (Fiction. 12 & up)