revolution
Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly is a tour de force YA novel. It's realistic fiction most of the way through, but with just enough historical fiction and fantasy to make it a somewhat genre-defying. At its heart, though, it's a problem novel about a girl, Andi, who loses her 10-year-old brother Truman to a freak accident, loses her father to an affair, and then loses her mother to mental instability following her brother's death. When her father institutionalizes her mother for treatment, he takes Andi with him to Paris where she is told to work on her senior thesis. She's just motivated enough to do that, because the thesis is about music, and guitar playing is the only thing that makes her want to live. She chugs anti-depressants at near suicidal levels, and yet this does not keep her from being suicidal. Go figure. Donnelly's descriptions of the raw grief at losing so much so irretrievably in a single year are all the more moving because they...