Harrowing.
After the rape and murder of a suburban 16-year-old, two girls learn to cope in a world that stubbornly insists on continuing without her.
Lark is a gymnast, diver and stellar student, until one January day she's kidnapped from her Arlington, Va., school. Her body is found naked, beaten and stabbed in the snowy woods. Over the next few months, the children and adults of Arlington recover—or fail to recover—from Lark's death. Interleaved chapters provide three points of view: Eve, who was Lark's childhood friend until a devastating experience of her own led to Eve's personality shift in middle school; Nyetta, whose parents are going through a messy divorce and who thought Lark was the best babysitter ever; and Lark herself, who recaps the rape and murder in gutwrenching ghostly interludes. Lark's ghost is haunting Nyetta in an attempt to get someone, anyone, to look directly at the damage done by the murderer. It's no easy task: This is a town where grief counselors teach girls that avoiding assault is a matter of how they dress, move and walk. It's a town where a mother doesn't take her daughter's assault seriously because there hasn't been penetrative sex. Nyetta and Eve will only be able to move past Lark's death if they face its most devastating truths.
Harrowing. (Fiction. 13 & up)Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-112287-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Laura Geringer/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Gripping and authentic in the ways it portrays grief and shows how moving forward means having to let go.
After her father dies, a teen drops out of high school, loses her job, and embarks on a four-week journey through the California backcountry.
Everyone in the Bear Creek Community Service program is assigned a nickname as part of starting over with “a blank slate.” No one needs to know your past or whether you’re there by choice or court order. All that matters is the present: working on hiking trail maintenance. For Atlas James, or Maps, as she’s now known, it’s an escape from the poor decisions she’s made since her father’s death from cancer and a tribute to him. One of his dying wishes was to hike the Western Sierra Trail with her—the same one she’ll now be spending the summer working on with Books, Junior, Sugar, and King. Maps is immediately drawn to group leader King, and as secrets are revealed, the two act as magnets, attracting and repelling one another. Maps’ tangible grief is centered as she copes with the loss of the only person who understood her and always had her back. Gradually, as they clear brush, dig drainage, and battle the backcountry and their pasts, a sense of family is forged among the crew. The palpable romantic tension between King and Maps propels this beautifully written story. Junior is coded Black; other major characters read white.
Gripping and authentic in the ways it portrays grief and shows how moving forward means having to let go. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063088580
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
From the first page to the last, this compassionate, funny, moving, compulsively readable novel about what makes a family...
Placing her daughter for adoption left a hole in Grace’s heart; her adoptive parents can’t fill it, and her birth mother’s unreachable—then Grace learns she has siblings.
Maya, 15, a year younger than Grace, was adopted by wealthy parents 13 months before their biological daughter, Lauren, arrived. Joaquin, nearly 18, a survivor of 17 failed foster-care placements and one failed adoption, is troubled when his current foster parents express a wish to adopt him. Grace reaches out, and the siblings soon bond. All—Maya especially, standing out in a family of redheads—are grateful to meet others with dark hair (only Joaquin identifies not as white but Latino) and weird food preferences (French fries with mayo). Still, each keeps secrets. Maya discusses her girlfriend but not her mother’s secret drinking; Joaquin edits out his failed adoption; Grace, her pregnancy and daughter’s birth. It hurts that her siblings have zero interest in tracking down the mom who gave them away, yet Grace persists. Chapters alternate through their third-person perspectives, straightforward structure and syntax delivering accessibility without sacrificing nuance or complexity. Family issues are neither airbrushed nor oversimplified (as the ambiguous title suggests). These are multifaceted characters, shaped by upbringing as well as their genes, in complicated families. Absent birthparents matter, as do bio siblings: when their parents separate, Lauren fears Maya will abandon her for her “real” siblings.
From the first page to the last, this compassionate, funny, moving, compulsively readable novel about what makes a family gets it right. (Fiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-233062-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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