Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

It’s been almost a year since Chloe and Shana’s mother had a schizophrenic break that resulted in her institutionalization, and the two sisters are dealing with their devastated home and their father’s withdrawal in very different ways. Fourteen-year-old Chloe has taken over care of Micah, their young brother adopted from a Russian institution, whose placement is still provisional, and she’s retaining her optimism about Mom’s return even as she wonders if she’ll follow in her mother’s footsteps. Older sister Shana masks her real anger and sadness with makeup and performed darkness as a Goth, hanging out evenings with Goth friends and seething at her father’s failure to step up for the family members who still desperately need him. Barkley and Hepler are the masters of alternating narration, with Chloe’s and Shana’s voices both believable, clearly different, and usefully complementary. The book overplays a little the unexplained allusions to the frightening event that precipitated Mom’s hospitalization, but that literary evasion correlates to the denial and secrecy rampant in the shattered family. The development that the sisters, not their father, begin to create a new stability for the family is a believable reality that’s touched with sadness as well as hope, as is the fact that they eventually turn outside the family for their new connections. Like Schumacher’s Black Box (BCCB 9/08) and Young’s The Opposite of Music (BCCB 4/07), this is an affecting story about families struggling to readjust in the face of one member’s affliction.