Mateo gets her, and while he’s certainly interested, he doesn’t push. He was nineteen, and he’ll never be twenty.” But one thing has changed: Anna has met Mateo, a talented chef-in-training her age at the restaurant where she works, and who has his own dreams and ambitions. And she has promised her mother and her therapist that Joe’s one-year “deadaversary” will mark the official end of her period of mourning (or else she’s likely to be packed off to a Christian grief boot camp in Hell, Michigan).īut, of course, Anna can’t stop thinking about Joe, and how she’s responsible. Now she’s spending the summer working as a waitress with her best girlfriend, Nat. She’s “lost her words.” Her parents have also split up, largely because of the trauma of losing Joe, so Anna’s world has pretty much fallen apart. But a year ago, Joe died suddenly of something flu-like and Anna blamed herself (you’ll find out why), and she hasn’t written anything since. Anna’s grandparents were killed when Joe was still very young and her parents suddenly became surrogate parents to Joe as well, so they’ve always been very close. And her biggest fan and supporter has always been her Uncle Joe, her father’s youngest brother, who is only three years older than her.
Her stories have already been published in literary journals, she’s won numerous competitions and awards, and everyone (including Anna herself) expects great things of her.
The protagonist is seventeen-year-old Anna O’Mally, a natural writer with major gifts, who is about to begin her senior year in high school somewhere near Detroit. I had never heard of this author, nor of the very small publisher that put out this book, but it got very strong reviews in sources I trust and it won a number of awards, so I gave it a shot.
And sometimes I disagree strongly with the reviews a book receives - good or bad - and I will explain exactly why I think they’re wrong. (Well, almost never.) I spent thirty-five years on the staff of one of the largest public library systems in the U.S., and I learned the value - the necessity, in fact - of pre-sorting the books I come across and identifying those I’m most likely to enjoy and appreciate. Are all the books I read really that good? The answer is that I don’t read randomly. Someone asked me recently how it is that the majority of the reviews I write are so positive.
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