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I came across this book by Sarah McCarry in this article about how male YA writers are given more credit for their work than female YA writers. The article included a list of recommended YA books by female authors, which of course resulted in me adding them to my to-read list.
One of those books was 17 & Gone, which I did not like, so I was hesitant to read this book off the same list, but I enjoyed this one so much more!
Given the title and the cover image of two girls kissing I had assumed this was going to be about a teenaged lesbian.
It is and it’s not. The main character/narrator, Atalanta (Tally), is super smart, really into astronomy and astrophysics, and not so much into getting along with other people. Her mom, Aurora, dropped Tally off on the doorstep of Aurora’s best friend, whom Tally calls “Aunt Beast”, and disappeared, never to be heard from again. No one has any idea who the father might be.
Tally grows up with Aunt Beast, Aunt Beast’s best friend, Raoul, and Raoul’s husband, Henri. She seems totally cool with growing up without either of her biological parents, although she only has one friend. She has no qualms about her lack of a social life because she’s much smarter than most people and doesn’t really care to dumb things down for others. Her adoptive parents don’t mind this and she manages to muddle through high school thinking she has no issues with the fact her mother abandoned her. She claims not to care, since her mother couldn’t have cared about her in order to abandon her the way she did.
Tally was one of those snarky characters I loved reading about, but we would never be friends IRL. She would be too frustrated with my idiocy and I wouldn’t have the patience for her superiority complex.
As you might gather, Tally is even less aware of and able to deal with her emotions than most teenagers. She spends most of her time not thinking about them and deriding those who do have and express emotions. It’s not until she realizes she sees her best friend, Shane, as more than a friend, that she realizes she has problems.
Shane, by the way, is a girl who has decided she’s really a boy. No surgery or anything, she just dresses like a boy and Tally consistently uses the male pronoun when talking about Shane.
Tally does not seem at all bothered by the fact that she’s attracted to a girl. I guess that’s a result of growing up with two gay guys in New York City. What bothers Tally is what would bother anyone in her situation: can their friendship survive this?
We don’t really get to find out because Tally gets a clue that her father might be a musician named Jack who’s currently in hiding outside Seattle. She goes out to meet him, but even though he lets her stay in his house and he doesn’t appear to have a job, he’s never around when she is, so she doesn’t get to ask him everything she came out to ask him. She falls into a relationship with a woman named Maddy and keeps forgetting to call her adopted family, despite having the best intentions of doing so, but that’s not the only thing that’s weird about this place.
Tally befriends the bar owner, Kathy, who has a tendency to answer Tally’s unspoken questions. By the end of the book, Tally isn’t even questioning this weird quirk of Kathy’s. Tally also has nightmares full of blood, a black-haird girl, and three-headed dogs just about every night she stays in this sleepy little town.
It turns out that Jack is not Tally’s father, although she does manage to talk him into playing music again. Jack was in love with Tally’s Aunt Beast, but left her and Aurora the moment he got a music deal. The book takes its title from a song Jack wrote about losing the love of his life.
Tally’s father is in fact not entirely human. Also Jack and Maddy might not be entirely human either. Tally dreams that Jack has a lyre, and when he plays in real life, wild animals come to listen to him.
Maddy casts some sort of spell that allows Tally to spend a few minutes with her mother, who is trapped in some sort of mystical black palace in the underworld with a cruel jailor. Tally’s father turns out to be the King Minos of legend, whom the god of death made into a judge and a collector and harvester of souls. Tally’s mother said he wanted Tally as well, but she wouldn’t let him have her, which was why she left Tally on her best friend’s doorstep.
So Tally, who was all about science and logic, gets her world turned upside down when she has to learn to accept the unexplainable. Tally gets to go back to New York City and resume her life, only now she realizes that emotions, however complicated they may be, are necessary and there’s nothing wrong with recognizing and dealing with them.
This book was awesome and I highly recommend it!
What did you guys read? Anything that was about something you weren’t expecting it to be about? I want to hear all about it!