Publishers Weekly
06/24/2024
A grieving teen from the Bronx turns a class journal into a lifeline in this high-stakes page-turner from Stork (I Am Not Alone). “Half Mexican” 17-year-old Nico, who aspires to become a “great writer,” works at the fish market before school and sells weed for the X-Teca gang. His routines are thrown asunder by an eerie dream about his deceased unrequited love, Puerto Rican–cued Rosario, which seems to prophesize his death, as well as the deaths of his mother and 12-year-old half brother Javier. When his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer and Javier begins his X-Teca initiation, Nico’s dream starts to feel real. In response, he dedicates his AP English journal to investigating how college-bound Rosario—whose writerly ambitions inspired Nico’s future plans—died via a heroin overdose. By understanding Rosario’s life, will Nico be able to save his own? As he works through his unresolved grief and struggles to cope with worsening home dynamics, Nico’s daily writing assignments morph into a “novelesque... journal on steroids” that probes honesty, truth, and a writer’s way of life. Plainly yet piercingly voiced by a complex, flawed protagonist navigating tough choices, this immersive tale concludes with a brief—and powerful—message of hope. Ages 12–up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Praise for One Last Chance to Live:
A Junior Library Guild Selection
"A grieving teen from the Bronx turns a class journal into a lifeline in this high-stakes page-turner." -- Publishers Weekly
"Raw and real. Hard to put down." -- Kirkus Reviews
Praise for I Am Not Alone:
A Junior Library Guild Selection
★ "An affecting, deeply emotional story. An important book." — Booklist, starred review
★ "Alberto's suspected schizophrenia makes him heartbreakingly susceptible to both the best and worst of humanity. An illuminatingly powerful story about mental illness, young love, faith, and hope." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
★ "This taut and suspensefully plotted emotional drama offers a nuanced, poignant story of friendship in the face of adversity." — The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, starred review
"The narrative's high-stakes conflicts are front and center, [but] it's the sheer sweetness of Alberto and Grace's love story that sets the tone of this hopeful read." — Publishers Weekly
"An intricate hunt for truth through the maze of mental illness. Stork's resonating, empathic fiction once again provides audiences with convincing reasons to believe 'I am not alone.'" — Shelf Awareness
School Library Journal
09/01/2024
Gr 10 Up—One night, 17-year-old aspiring writer Nico Kardos, who is Mexican American, has a dream in which he is dead and is visited by the love of his life, Rosario Zamora, who died of a heroin overdose six months before. Convinced that he will be dead within the year upon waking and driven mad by the unremembered thing Rosario whispered in his ear during the dream, Nico's life becomes fractured. Between his desires to write something worthwhile and find out what truly happened to Rosario, he is overwhelmed. His mother's sickness is worsening; his 12-year-old brother is on the verge of joining the same gang that's pressuring Nico to run drugs. And, he has a chance encounter with a young woman he swears is Rosario's doppelgänger. Told over the course of two months and written as entries in Nico's creative writing journal, Stork's newest novel is a deeply emotional look at both the beauty of the creative process and the pain that can be found there, as well as an examination of the oppression and suffering that are in place in the world. The introspection that fills the pages of Nico's journal may be too verbose for some readers—and indeed, there are some passages and dialogue that don't feel teen-voiced—but every reader who has ever wanted to create will sympathize with Nico's plight, as will those who know all too well the obstacles Nico faces. VERDICT A moving portrayal of a teen confronting the world and himself. Recommended.—Tyler Hixson
Kirkus Reviews
2024-07-19
Nico wants to write his way out of his life, but does he have what it takes?
Seventeen-year-old Nico Kardos wants to be a writer. He also wants to go to Sarah Lawrence College and get away from his Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, where the girl he’d loved his whole life, Rosario Zamora, died from a heroin overdose six months earlier and where Javier, his younger half brother, is headed for a cruel, hard life in the local gang, the X-Tecas. One night Nico has what he believes to be a prophetic dream about his own death and the deaths of his mom and Javier. In the dream, Rosario appears and says something to him that he can’t recall when he wakes up. When Nico’s mother falls seriously ill just one week later, he wonders whether he can change his future—and whether he wants to. Is he fated to follow in Rosario’s footsteps? In this story that unfolds in the form of journal entries for his AP English class, Nico’s interior monologue feels raw and real, expressed in an authentic, youthful voice. The grittiness of his reality—absent fathers, the need for money, and the desire for bigger things—is at the core of award-winner Stork’s latest. At times the journal entries make narrative jumps that feel jolting, but the novel moves at a quick clip and is hard to put down. All major characters are Latine.
An honest, brutal exploration of reality.(Fiction. 13-18)
