Gr. 7-10. Haunted by the car crash on a bridge that killed her beloved mother, Jenna, 15, moves in with her aunt's family in New Hampshire, but she cannot deal with her guilt and sorrow. As a passenger in the car, was she to blame? Should she be dead? Therapy doesn't help. She won't reconcile with her dad, and she hates kids who pity her. Then she accidentally overdoses and narrowly escapes gang rape. It's Crow, the kind, gorgeous biker she loves, who saves her. There is too much going on, with everything spelled out, including the metaphor of her need to cross over the treacherous bridge. But Oates gets the contemporary teen voice just right, and Jenna's first-person narrative moves at breakneck speed. Best of all, though, is the end; as in Oates' amazing short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the shocking surprise conclusion grows organically from the story and makes everything new.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up–Jenna Abbott, 15, is struggling to come to terms with the car accident that killed her mother and nearly took her own life as well. Formerly athletic and smart, she suddenly finds herself unable to concentrate or communicate with anyone. She is broken in both body and spirit and desperate to escape into the blue, which is how she remembers the drug-induced haze immediately after the accident. Not wanting anything to do with her father and his new family in California, she moves to New Hampshire to live with her aunt and uncle, and begins looking for ways to escape. She steals OxyContin from her uncle's medicine cabinet and becomes friends with Trina, who is dealing with her own substance-abuse problems. It takes two near-disasters for Jenna to tentatively open up to her classmate Crow and face her fears and grief. Oates is at her best telling the stories of teenage girls dealing with internal trauma and outside pressures. Jenna's pain at losing the only person truly close to her and the isolation she creates for herself are poignantly drawn. Her understanding that her choices are not what her mother would want for her is especially telling and may speak to teens in comparable situations. Similar in topic to E. R. Frank's
Wrecked (S & S, 2005), this powerful novel is well worth reading.
–Stephanie L. Petruso, Anne Arundel County Public Library, Odenton, MD Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Kurzbeschreibung
Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, she is alone, desperate to forget what happened that day on the bridge.
Then Jenna meets Crow, and her life is once again turned upside down. He begins to break down the wall that Jenna has built around her emotions. But can she bring herself to face the memories she's tried so hard to erase?
Über den Autor
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
