01/30/2017
Sarah is 16 and going through an emotional crisis. She is a talented artist but she has stopped creating art, as well as going to school. Instead, she spends her days wandering around Philadelphia, where she literally encounters other versions of herself. She meets 10-year-old Sarah, 23-year-old Sarah, and even 40-year-old Sarah—all of whom try to get her to face traumatic memories and truths that she has been repressing and denying. Voice actor Vacker’s first-person narration empathetically conveys all the complexities and nuances of Sarah’s emotional state: denial and defensiveness, confusion, fear, anger, and pain. Listeners feel the character struggling to understand her family problems and work out her inner turmoil, while simultaneously trying to avoid doing so by creating a stable facade. Vacker subtly differentiates among the book’s characters but doesn’t create unique voices for them. For example, she uses a higher pitch to sound childish for 10-year-old Sarah, a deeper, angry pitch for Sarah’s father. This production excellently brings to life the novel’s portrayal of a teenager struggling to survive and overcome childhood trauma. Ages 14–up. A Dutton hardcover. (Oct.)
Meet the Young Adults, the B&N Teen Blog’s swat team of awesome teenaged bloggers. YA literature is a strange and wonderful landscape of books that should be read by everybody, but each month we highlight the perspective of the teens reading the best of the best books written for and about them. Check back monthly to see what they’re […]
It’s the happiest, hardest day in the bookish calendar, when all the past year’s most glorious reads are winnowed down into a list of the best of the best books to cross my desk in 2016. Here there be magnificent debuts, swoony, promise-keeping series finales, and bolts from the blue; books that enchant, provoke, and break hearts. This […]
Artistic ambition is one of those things that seems to preternaturally age you, in part because you’re forced to learn how to be professional even in your youth and in part because it always seems to demand surrounding yourself with experts who have actual life experience before you’re old enough for that to be your […]