In Wild Awake, Hilary T. Smith's exhilarating and heart-wrenching YA debut novel, seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd has big plans for her summer without her parents. She intends to devote herself to her music and win Battle of the Bands with her bandmate and best friend, Lukas. Perhaps then, in the excitement of victory, he will finally realize she's the girl of his dreams.
But a phone call from a stranger shatters Kiri's plans. He says he has her sister's stuff—her sister, Sukey, who died five years ago. This call throws Kiri into a spiral of chaos that opens old wounds and new mysteries.
Like If I Stay and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wild Awake explores loss, love, and what it means to be alive.
Hilary T. Smith lives in Portland, Oregon, where she studies North Indian classical music and works on native plant restoration. She is the author of Wild Awake.
What People are Saying About This
Gayle Forman
“Hilary T. Smith’s absorbing debut whispers with mystery, drawing us into a world of dead sisters, family secrets, midnight bicycle rides, music, madness and art—ultimately exploring that most profound mystery of all: love.”
Some great books get nominated for awards, get movie deals, hit bestseller lists, and get so much publicity you can’t swing a stick without hitting a display. Some…don’t. Thanks to some fantastic award picks this year, most notably by the Morris committee (which awards excellence in a debut), this list isn’t quite as long as […]
Welcome back to another edition of YAs That Get it Right, in which pros weigh in on YA books they think nailed an aspect of the human experience. Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I asked some of my favorite authors of mental health YA, as well as (and including) authors who are also […]
Issues of mental health are tricky enough to understand in life; to capture them well in literature can be nearly impossible. It’s far too easy to get caught up in stereotypes, misinformation, and stigmatization. But when a book does get it right, it can be a literal lifesaver. Literature with teen protagonists suffering from mental […]
For me to really binge a TV show, it has to fill three criteria: great writing, great female characters, and lesbians. And since Jessica Jones isn’t coming back for a few months, and I’ve just finished bingeing Orphan Black, I needed a new show to tide me over and fill the awesome-female-character void in my […]