The Land of 10,000 Madonnas

After eighteen-year-old Jesse Serrano dies, the five young adults closest to him attempt to track down his long-gone mother. They follow her trail from Frankfurt to Rome on a quest that's by turns poignant, humorous, tense, and joyful. Interspersed with Jesse's meditative journal entries, the chapters shift point of view among the travelers, conveying their various (and very different) experiences of grief and healing.

Not long after eighteen-year-old Jesse Serrano dies from a congenital heart defect, the five young adults closest to him-his girlfriend Lillian; his best friend Matt; and his cousins Callista ("Cal"), Trevor, and Ben-find themselves on a European tour bequeathed by Jesse and financed by his unused college fund. Each of them has inherited something of Jesse's: a collection of maps, a watch, a photograph, a journal, a credit card. While Jesse's rationale for the trip is initially unclear to the characters, they figure it out soon enough: he's hoping they will track down his mother, Thea, who abandoned him and his father when Jesse was an infant. They follow Thea's trail from Frankfurt to Rome on a quest that's by turns poignant, humorous, tense, and joyful. Point of view shifts among the five travelers as Hattemer conveys their various (and very different) experiences of grief and healing. Between Jesse's meditative interspersed journal entries, the chapters' changing POV, and the flashbacks included in both, the timeline can be a bit hard to follow, but this occasionally roundabout quality of the narrative is well suited to the whirlwind trip. The characters-especially Jesse himself, in his own writing and in his keenly felt absence-are realistic and relatable. katie bircher