The Place Between Breaths

Gr 9 Up—Grace King is a resilient and talented high school senior, who has had to raise herself since her mother, who has schizophrenia, left the family when Grace was five. Grace's father, a doctor turned researcher and recruiter, has obsessively devoted his life to finding his wife and advancing the treatment of the disease. More than a decade later, he is sure that he has lured the best geneticists in the field to work at a lab outside of Chicago and that they are about to make a significant breakthrough. Grace, who has won a coveted internship at the lab, has long since given up on romantic notions of her mother's return or the belief in a miracle cure. She is a hard-core realist and a scientist through and through, until she starts to exhibit many of the symptoms that took her mother away from her and is forced to reexamine everything she thought she knew about faith and religion, science, and, most of all, hope. Steeped in lyricism and metaphor, Na's devastating story explores the workings of the human mind, the melancholy sweetness of memory, and the power of dreams. The narrative is revealed in nonlinear seasonal chapters told in different voices, which reinforce the protagonist's sense of dislocation and disorientation.