Y

October 22, 2012
Sixteen-year-old Shannon isn’t sure if she’s a drifter by choice or by necessity; her earliest years were characterized first by her abandonment on the doorstep of the YMCA on Vancouver Island and, as she grew, by a series of foster homes, some truly horrific, others merely neglectful. Even after she’s taken in at the age of five by Miranda, a single mom who raises Shannon affectionately alongside her own child, Shannon still longs to belong. Unsettled and propelled by feelings of otherness, she investigates her origins, risking the new, stable connections she’s made. Shannon’s first-person narration—which begins at the moment of her abandonment, intentionally challenging the artifice of narration—alternates with chapters focusing on her birth mother, Yula, and on what led Yula to abandon her baby. Shannon’s awkwardness and emotional vulnerability make her an easy character to care for, but her physical oddities and sexual experimentation read as transparent attempts at generating conflict. While Shannon’s story might offer hope for anyone involved in a nontraditional family, Yula’s story is more compelling. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment.

Starred review from November 15, 2012
As a newborn, Shannon is abandoned at the local "Y"--and then spends much of her young life asking "Why?" The cards seem stacked against Shannon as she tries to piece together the fragments of her life. Celona reconstructs the story with an almost Faulkner-ian complexity as Shannon moves back and forth through the chronology of her life but also through her imaginative vision of her parents' relationship. Along the way, she confronts the most painful question one can ask: Why was I abandoned? It turns out, there's an eyewitness, Vaughn, who saw Shannon being deposited on the steps of the Y, and eventually, Shannon seeks him out to get one perspective on her story. (For one thing, she wants to know whether her mother kissed her before she abandoned her.) Shannon eventually discovers a complex and troubled family history that involves a variety of dysfunctions, including drinking and drugs. As a child, Shannon moves through several foster homes, each with its own issues, before she settles in with Miranda, a single mom with a daughter, Lydia-Rose. As one might expect, Shannon's relationship with both stepmother and stepsister is rocky--and Shannon is not, after all, the easiest child to raise. Shannon's birth mother, Yula, is herself a teenager when Shannon is born, and her father, Harrison, does drugs. Eventually, Shannon develops curiosity about her birthparents and seeks them out, leading to yet more emotional trauma. Celona writes movingly about basic questions of identity, questions exacerbated by the unhappy circumstances of Shannon's birth.

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September 1, 2012

Y stands for an unknown quantity, which sums up Shannon, abandoned as a baby on a YMCA doorstep. After ricocheting through foster care, she finds a good home but is desperate to understand how a parent could give up a child. Gung-ho in-house enthusiasm.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2012
Set on Vancouver Island, Celona's compelling first novel opens with a desperate young mother abandoning her newborn girl on the front steps of the Victoria YMCA. Passed back and forth, cradled in one set of arms then another, the child is first granted the name Shandi, then Samantha, and later, Shannon. One foster mother rewards Shannon with a cube of cheese if she manages to sit still, but the restless three-year-old is more often met by abuse and eventually banished to live with another family. At age five, Shannon is adopted by Miranda, a single mother whose only expectations of her daughter are fairness, kindness, and respect. While Shannon thrives living in this caring household, she struggles to reconcile the pain of her unknown past. Humorously self-deprecating (I'm not hideous, but I'm definitely a cross between Shirley Temple and a pug), teenage Shannon embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery. This is at once a moving coming-of-age story full of fresh starts, a haunting family story full of heavy disappointments, and an extraordinarily quiet story full of hope.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)