Susannah Goldstein

"So much of grief is unlearning," observes Wynne-Jones in this perceptive and multi-layered page-turner. When Evan's single father, Clifford, dies suddenly, the high-schooler must work through his own grief while dealing with Clifford's estranged father Griff, a military man who Clifford had claimed was a murderer. Griff's also a control freak and is somehow tied to the strange book that was sent to Clifford just before he died. As Evan reads the book—the translated journal of a WWII Japanese soldier stranded on a mystical island with an American Marine plane-crash survivor