Goth Girl Rising

by Barry Lyga

Overview

Time is a funny thing in the hospital. In the mental ward. You lose track of it easily. After six months in the Maryland Mental Health Unit, Kyra Sellers, a.k.a. Goth Girl, is going home. Unfortunately, she’s about to find out that while she was away, she lost track of more than time.

Kyra is back in black, feeling good, and ready to make up with the only person who’s ever appreciated her for who she really is.

But then she sees him. Fanboy. Transcended from everything he was into someone she barely recognizes.
And the anger and memories come rushing back.

There’s so much to do to people when you’re angry.
Kyra’s about to get very busy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547417479
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	405
Sales rank:	321,410
File size:	830 KB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Barry Lyga is a recovering comic book geek and the author of many books, including The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, Goth Girl Rising, Boy Toy, and Hero-Type for HMH, Wolverine: Worst Day Ever for Marvel Books, and Archvillian for Scholastic. He has also written comic books about everything from sword-wielding nuns to alien revolutionaries. He worked as marketing manager at Diamond Comic Distributers for ten years. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.Visit Barry online at www.barrylyga.com.

Read an Excerpt

One

My mother and I both spent a lot of time in hospitals. Unlike her, I survived.

Before she went and died, my mom told me to stop bitching about my cramps all the time. "It’s nothing that every other woman on the planet hasn’t gone through," she said.

And besides, she went on, your period is a good thing. It’s a sign that you’re alive and healthy.

Easy for her to say—cancer was eating her lungs from the inside out, so what’s the big deal about some cramps, right?

Still, I knew that what I was experiencing wasn’t right or normal. It wasn’t what other girls were feeling every month. (I know—I asked around.)

Weird thing, though: After she died, my cramps sort of got better. It’s not like they went away; they just stopped being so intense and so consuming. I started to think that, OK, maybe this is what other girls felt. Like I had been abnormal before, but now I was somehow becoming normal, that now the world was working properly and everything was good and normal and usual.

Everything except my mom’s face . . .

My mom’s face before they closed the casket looked like a Barbie doll’s.

A Barbie doll someone had left in the sandbox too long.

All plasticky and too shiny, but somehow gray at the same time.

And then one day after the funeral—it was a pretty nice day, too—I took a box cutter from my dad’s workshop and slashed across my wrist. It hurt, but not that much. Not bad at all.

So I slashed the other one, too.

And that’s how I ended up in the emergency room and then in front of a judge and then locked up in a mental hospital.

That was my first time in the hospital. And I got out and I covered up my scars and I went on with my life and I tried to figure out what it was all about, and I’m still trying to figure it out.

But it just gets more and more complicated all the time. Every day. The world doesn’t slow down long enough for you to figure out anything; it keeps adding things in. Things like geeky guys and comic books and comic book conventions and effed-up teachers and . . .

And another stay in the hospital.

Editorial Reviews

Lyga returns to the characters and school from The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, this time writing as Kyra, just released from a mental hospital. Kyra is mad at her dad for committing her, at friends who copy her new all-white clothes look and at a “hypocrite” teacher who espouses feminism but uses her body for attention. She focuses her anger on Fanboy, who played a role in her hospitalization and then ignored her for six months (meanwhile, publishing his comic in the school literary journal and becoming more confident—and popular). But even as Kyra plots revenge, she realizes she has other feelings (“God, I just want to tear his head off. And throw him down on the bed”). Her revenge plans never seem fully credible, but Kyra remains a fierce, unstoppable character. Readers will love getting her side of the story, whether she is raging about sexism in letters to her hero, writer Neil Gaiman, or finally figuring out that the person she needs is “someone who appreciates not just what you do, but how you do it.” Ages 14–up. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

After six months in a mental hospital, Kyra, the newly shaven-headed heroine of The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (2006), has only one plan: to exact embarrassing revenge on sweet, loyal Fan Boy for not contacting her while she was away. His status at school has risen since she left, and now his graphic novel-published in the school's literary magazine-has made him a legend. This, of course, only augments her eagerness to spill his secrets. Lyga's latest is more character sketch than story. Kyra may be traumatized by her mother's death and furious at her dad for sending her away, but her anger doesn't feel strong enough to fuel her determination to take Fan Boy down, in the absence of a logical rationale. She's definitely confused, but she doesn't seem heartless. Plus, Fan Boy's dog-like devotion to her makes her look like an even bigger jerk. Still, goth teens and fans of the first novel will be drawn into the darkness that is her life. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews

"Readers will love getting her side of the story, whether she is raging about sexism in letters to her hero, writer Neil Gaiman, or finally figuring out that the person she needs is "someone who appreciates not just what you do, but how you do it."—Publishers Weekly

"In this sequal to The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (2006), Lyga dives with typical boldness into the complexity of teen emotions and, for the first time, the female perspective...it is Kyra's wholly believable questions and her forceful voice that will stay with readers."—Booklist

"It is a no-brainer that fans of the first book will eat this one up, but new readers will not have any trouble following the story as Lyga peppers this book with ample information from the first. Buy multiple copies of this one — it will go out and get passed around — and might not come back."—VOYA, April 2010 —

From the Publisher