Gr 8 Up—Writing in a first-person journal format, complete with crossed out words and sentences, 16-year-old Evan invites readers into his confused existence as he mourns the loss of the girl he considered his best friend. Whatever happened to Ariel tore apart their friendship and left Evan and Ariel's boyfriend, Jack, bereft. Evan seems to teeter on the edge of sanity, musing about fractals and binary numbers and "so many frequencies playing in my mind." When photographs with ties to Ariel begin appearing on Evan's route home and in his locker, he and Jack try to track down the connection. A lead via Facebook turns out to be a dead end, and the locations show that the photographer must be intimately familiar with Ariel's life. The short chapters and the photographs themselves make this a quick read for most students. Plot holes may rankle some readers: Evan trashes Ariel's bedroom and no one notices? He is nearly run over by a train and there are no consequences? Some readers may feel a tad cheated by the ending, which introduces a heretofore unknown character. Nonetheless, the idea of a photographic novel is intriguing, and readers are likely to get caught up in the drama. Suggest it to those who enjoyed Matt de la Peña's I Will Save You (Delacorte, 2010) or the verse books by Ellen Hopkins.—Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley School, Fort Worth, TX
Evan likes logic and patterns, but they cannot assuage his grief for Ariel (a friend lost to mental illness) or explain the haunting, increasingly sinister photographs that appear as reminders of Ariel. Exposing both Evan's polished and uncensored thoughts (shown in struck-through text), Levithan captures the pain of indecision as well as action along with the ability of friendship to transcend suffering.
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