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336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 7, 2024
...sometimes you see another human and sense what shaped them, like looking at a painting and discerning the brushstrokes. No one protected her. And this is something our own daughters will never understand. That we were never girls, not really. For a moment we were children, yes. But a girl and a child are not the same. A child is a pet. A girl is prey. - MaureenI always laugh when someone starts a review with “I don’t know what I just read” but I’m going to start exactly the same way. Lucy - fragile, vulnerable, talented, forward-thinking - has died in a mysterious fall off a roof during a raucous party. We hear ten voices - teens who were friends or acquaintances with Lucy, mothers of a few of those teens, Lucy’s immature high school guidance counselor, and Lucy’s mother herself, all very real voices, each of whom saw varying facets of Lucy’s life. Each one has something important to say about Lucy, about life, and about themselves.
“Morals are just something you pretend to have until it’s too hard to uphold them.” - MonaThere was an overwhelmingly number of significant characters, and I had to make a chart of each one and how they had interacted with Lucy and with each other to keep them all straight in my head; it was a struggle for this reader to keep putting the pieces together to see the whole picture. I’m going to give this 5 stars because the book as a whole seems to have turned out to be more than the sum of its parts, and make a note to reread the whole thing in the future (keeping my meticulous notes of course) to see if I can understand more.
“I’d forgotten how tiring it gets to be around someone who thinks entertaining you and connecting to you are the same thing.” - Natalie