By Jo Knowles
Twelve-year-old Fern feels lost in her big, loud family, and then a sudden accident takes her little brother and changes all of them.
Fern is twelve and feels like the easy-to-overlook one in a big, loud family that runs a restaurant called Harry's. Her older brother Holden is gay, sorting out a first crush and putting up with boys at school who won't leave him alone about it. Her sister Sara is stuck doing a gap year behind the ice cream counter. And her little brother Charlie is three, sticky, and forever underfoot. Fern loves him and is sick of him in about equal measure, the way you are with a small brother who wrecks your things and trails you everywhere. Then one afternoon nobody's watching closely, Charlie runs where he shouldn't, and the family's whole world tips over. The rest of the book is Fern carrying a guilt far too heavy for her, a family figuring out how to be a family again with one of them missing, and a brother worth standing up for.
Knowles makes you love this whole ridiculous family in the funny early chapters, so when the accident comes it knocks the wind out of you the way it does the family. That's the book's real feat — it's genuinely warm and often funny before it ever asks you to grieve with people you've come to know. The Holden thread runs right alongside all of it: a gay older brother who's loved fiercely at home even while some boys at school are cruel to him, which keeps a bright, steady warmth going even in the book's darkest stretch. This is the longest and most demanding book on the trail, and it asks the most of a reader, with the sudden death of a toddler and an older sister certain it was her fault. It's for a strong reader who can sit with real sadness, with you within reach for the end.