June 26, 2023
Zimmerman (My Eyes Are Up Here) delivers a suspenseful novel about three siblings struggling to stay afloat after their mother’s death. With a boyfriend she only tolerates and an uninvolved father who lives two hours away, 17-year-old Drew can’t wait until she can escape to college. In the meantime, while her unreliable mother is preoccupied with shady side hustles, rule-following Drew serves as the parental figure for her acerbic 15-year-old sister Carna and guileless eight-year-old half-brother Lock. Mom constantly asks Drew to “just do this one thing for me”; this time, she requests that Drew stay home with her siblings while their mother travels from Wisconsin to Mexico to attend a New Year’s Eve Justin Timberlake concert. Things take a grim turn, however, when Drew and Carna discover their mother’s frozen body in the family’s storage shed, and Drew uncovers the depth of her illegal schemes, including receiving Social Security payments for Drew’s dead grandmother. Short chapters sometimes lend to sporadic pacing, but the siblings’ enduring relationship provides a strong through line, while cinematic prose and Drew’s wry first-person voice convey both gruesome and darkly humorous descriptions of the trio’s efforts to stay together. Characters cue as white. Ages 14–up.
July 1, 2023
Three siblings go to dramatic lengths to hide their neglectful mother's disappearance in this comedic novel. Drew, who is almost 18, is used to the responsibility of caring for Carna, her deeply sarcastic 15-year-old sister, and Lock, her sweet brother who is just 8. She's been filling in the sizable gaps left by her mom's irresponsibility since she was in grade school, but even she is challenged when her mom stops responding to texts en route to a Justin Timberlake concert in Mexico. Additionally, though Drew is dedicated to her younger charges, her exit plan after graduation has been in the works for a long time. Drew's bitingly funny, smart, and deceptively vulnerable voice drives this contemporary fiction offering that delivers madcap comedy, a bit of a mystery, and an engaging family drama. Some secondary characters are more developed than others, and the short, vignette-style chapters feel a little choppy in places, but Drew, Carna, and Lock are an unforgettable trio that readers will wholeheartedly root for despite--and also because of--their realistic problems and human fallibilities. The rural Wisconsin setting of their curmudgeonly father's lake cabin and the wintry details of Larch Leap, the fictional town they live in, are spot-on, adding an appealing sense of place to this character-driven story. All of the characters seem to be white. An often hilarious yet also poignant tale of sibling loyalty. (Fiction. 13-18)
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August 1, 2023
Gr 8 Up-Eldest daughter and the most functional member of her household, Drew is used to picking up her mom Heidi's slack for the sake of Carna and Lock, her younger siblings. It's frustrating but not all that surprising when Heidi decides to abscond to Mexico to see a Justin Timberlake concert with little thought of school, food, or any of the other requirements of caring for children. But Heidi never makes it to Mexico, and when Drew and Carna discover her body in the shed, alerting anyone who might force them to be separated is obviously the last resort. The sisters know that time will run out, and their desperate, impossible situation just keeps getting worse as the weather warms up, the federal agent on Heidi's trail for fraud is circling closer and closer, and most frustrating of all, Drew (and her computer) begin to be haunted by Heidi's ghost. The family's income comes from reviewing products online, another job Drew picks up when her mother dies, and the continual inclusion of pieces of these reviews gives buoyancy to a somewhat dark narrative. Drew's boyfriend feels like a bit of an afterthought; the siblings-against-the-world vibes are strong and moments of shared emotion between them are some of the highlights of the story. Though the dead body in the shed may be unrealistic, the universality of teens needing to make adult decisions they are ill-equipped to handle feels exceedingly real. VERDICT A witty, off-beat, and strangely charming look at just how far an eldest child will go to keep their younger siblings together.-Allie Stevens
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