There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.Įveryone believes that Salil Singh killed his girlfriend, Andrea Bell, five years ago-except Pippa Fitz-Amobi.
Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. In an era in which teen literature is increasingly under fire for its lack of racial diversity, a blonde, presumably white character putting on a traditionally black hairstyle as a symbol of her own toughness and self-acceptance feels catastrophically out of touch.Ī powerful story of healing undermined by its central symbol. Each of Macy's current relationships is carefully imagined, each unique but shaped in its own way by Macy's past trauma. Flashbacks-matter-of-fact, never graphic or sensationalized, and fraught with ambivalence-are handled particularly well. Macy and Sebastian's brief but intimate conversation at the party sparks a series of changes in Macy: she starts visiting Sebastian in the hospital, she twists her blond hair into dreadlocks, and she begins-slowly, and not always voluntarily-to make sense of her past. Then, the next morning, Sebastian disappears the rumor mill has it he's gone to the psych ward after a suicide attempt.
Macy first met Sebastian when he moved to her suburban town in elementary school, but it's at her friend Rebecca's party many years later that Macy first gets the sense that Sebastian really sees her. A friendship with a troubled classmate helps Macy confront the childhood sexual trauma she's kept secret for years.
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