Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Lucy and Evan were children together, pushing each other’s limits and imagining themselves into a fantasy world when their own lives seemed too ordinary. Then Lucy’s mom and dad split, and Lucy moved away. While Evan became a stellar college-bound student Lucy walked on the wild side, drinking, smoking, and experimenting with sex and drugs until her mother finally kicked her out. Over the years, the two weeks she spends with her dad every winter have kept friendship alive between Lucy and Evan, but this year’s visit reveals a radical change in her; she’s now completely goth, with a sullen attitude to complete the look. Evan tries to find the old Lucy, but his conversation is met with her sulks, and it isn’t until they finally kiss, something Lucy has apparently wanted to do for a long time, that she thaws enough to scold him for not getting how painful her life is. The third-person narration switches from Evan’s to Lucy’s viewpoint midway through, accompanied throughout by Evan’s ongoing comic strip that he develops in an attempt to work through the awkwardness between him and Lucy. Emond also writes like a graphic artist; a walk down a snow-covered street is narrated one closely observed step at a time, while the connections between the real emotional lives of Evan and Lucy and their comic characters on a fantasy quest are left unremarked for readers to sort out. The dense partial realism gives immediacy to the story, but neither character arc is fully realized, and the miracle of literary coincidence that brings them back together in the end strains credulity. Meanwhile, Lucy and Evan become poster children for the increasingly prevalent theme in YA literature of forestalling adulthood for the sake of living a more adventurous and less responsible life; their suburban malaise will be recognizable, even if narratively unsatisfying, to readers.