YA contemporary with a sprinkling of the fantastical. Follows a teenage girl – Mexican-American, queer, a high school student, works in her family’s pastry shop and has a knack for knowing the perfect baked good to meet the needs or fulfill the desires of anyone who comes in. At a party at the home of some rich kids from her school, she is assaulted in one room and a random boy from somewhere else (who had been drugged) is assaulted in another. After, she manages to get him to a hospital, but takes off before he wakes up. She tells no one about the experience, does her best to repress it all and just get on with life…but of course it doesn’t work that way. And then the boy transfers to her school in the fall. He doesn’t remember much about that night, but she remembers everything, and she feels drawn to try and help him.
Really, really liked it. A smart exploration of trauma and its various aftermaths. Not always easy to read, and in moments downright painful, because it looks at its subject matter head-on and it does not flinch. At the same time, it does not have the kind of unrelenting heaviness you might expect. Instead, it is a skilful (and, I think, true-to-life) weave of all sorts of different kinds of moments – of the sweet, the alive, the joyful, the loving, along with the inevitable rage and pain and grief. I really like McLemore’s writing, with its mix of clarity and a little bit of magic. It would be very easy for some of the devices that she chooses for this book – the pastry-picking knack, the main character’s experience of her trauma through objects mysteriously turning to glass and shattering – to come across as hokey or overdone, but I never got that at all. And if the arc of the book has a bit more justice at the end than is true in real life for the vast majority of people who are sexually assaulted, well, who can really complain about a narratively well-earned not-exactly-happy-given-the-premise-but-satisfying ending, right? Highly recommended.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.