Middle grade contemporary. The protagonist, Hazel, is a 13 year-old girl, an older sister, and a daughter of a single mom. Hazel is deeply traumatized from the kayaking accident two years before that killed her other mom but spared her. Since then, she and her mom and her sister have been moving a lot, living in a lot of different towns, never settling down or developing roots, and never really talking about the accident and the painful hole it has left in their lives. Except this time when they set up shop in a new town, they happen to meet an old friend of her (surviving) mother’s, who has a daughter Hazel’s age who also clearly wants to be friends, and this unhealthy but reassuring pattern starts shifting under Hazel’s feet.
I really like Ashley Herring Blake’s books. I think this is the third or fourth I’ve read, and they are just so effective at dealing honestly and complexly with hard stuff through age-appropriate good storytelling that ultimately feels life- and possibility-affirming. In this book, loss of a parent, survivor guilt, trauma, anxiety, depression – it’s all there, all shown from the inside through Hazel’s experience, and it is well done without being unbearably heavy. I think the only element of the book that could have been done better is in the section after the story’s climax – which itself I saw coming, at least in its broad outlines, but which was no less effective despite that – when various relational things are being resolved among the characters. Some of that, particularly among the younger characters, just took on a sort of shallow too-quick-too-neat feeling, which I suspect was in part an effort to bring the reader out of the emotional place the book had just gone to, but which felt to me like a bit of a stumble on the dismount, so to speak. Anyway, that minor quibble aside, I really liked this and will continue to read whatever AHB writes.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.