The Way the Light Bends

January 15, 2018
Artistically gifted, academically challenged Linc is the biological child of white professional parents who wish Linc could be more like her black, transracially adopted sister, Holly--smart, athletic, popular.Holly's adoption from a Ghanaian orphanage was underway when Linc, four months younger, was conceived. Once close, the sisters' paths have diverged. Linc's on academic probation at their private school, where Holly's an academic superstar even while juggling a boyfriend, student government, and soccer. Linc's growing missteps (suggestive of ADD) trigger parental strictures and scolding lectures; her pleas for photography classes and transfer to an arts-focused school are vetoed. Revisiting Central Park's Seneca Village site--a 19th-century community of freed blacks and European immigrants--where she and Holly played as children, Linc's inspired to use photography to tell its history (its pre-European inhabitants aren't mentioned) for a school project. Park and library visits provide useful cover for secret photography classes and a romance with classmate and fellow artist Silas. Linc's solitary journey is convincing, but Holly, the only adopted character, never comes into focus. The questions and uncertainties she shares with Linc (wishing they'd visited her orphanage on the family's trip to Ghana, wondering about her birth mother) remain fundamentally unexplored. Holly remains an enigma, her character arc peripheral (her image is omitted from the cover), her story half-told.Occasionally pulled off course by tangential threads and underdeveloped characters, Linc's struggle to chart her own future, unfolding in graceful verse, makes a compelling read. (Fiction.13-17)

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February 1, 2018

Gr 7 Up-What happens when you have to choose between being yourself and pleasing others? This is a central question in this intricately woven novel in verse. Holly and Linc share an intense bond as sisters, but lately Holly is an academic superstar, while Linc's inability to succeed in school is a constant disappointment to their exacting mother. A blossoming photographer, Linc strives to make her parents and teachers register the value in her artistic vision; but she has a pervasive feeling that she does not belong at her competitive New York City school or within her own family. If only she could get into the Innovative Arts Academy, maybe everyone would understand her own vision for her life. A well-executed subplot sees Linc using her art to make the invisible history of Seneca Village, with its African American community and its Irish and German immigrants, visible. The author deftly avoids negative stereotyping in developing the diverse cast. Linc's best friend is gay. Holly was adopted from Ghana, while Linc is her parents' biological, though unplanned, daughter. The idea that "humans are their choices" is a pervasive and worthy message throughout the novel, and Linc learns to make wise and authentic choices. Her boyfriend turns out to deeply disappoint, and Linc closes off the relationship with a healthy finality. VERDICT Begging to be paired with Marilyn Nelson's My Seneca Village, give this book to any students who have ever felt invisible or who have ever struggled to feel at home in a traditional academic setting.-Melissa Williams, Berwick Academy, ME

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