Year of Mistaken Discoveries

November 25, 2013
Avery and her childhood friend Nora used to call themselves Sisters of Choice (both girls were adopted), and they dreamed of finding their birth mothers someday. Since entering high school, Avery and Nora have grown apart, but after Nora overdoses on pills, Avery decides to restart her search for her biological mother in tribute to their friendship. “This was something she couldn’t do, so I need to finish it,” she tells Brody, another grieving friend of Nora’s, who helps Avery turn her investigation into a joint senior year project, much to her adoptive parents’ dismay. Cook (The Almost Truth) combines friendship drama, boy troubles, romance, family conflict, and college application stress with a protagonist trying to understand who she really is in the wake of tragedy. Although the resolutions of Avery’s conflicts with her parents, friends, and the boys in her life are overly neat, her discoveries are grounded and realistic, and it’s easy to identify with her efforts to understand her roots and begin the next chapter in her life. Ages 14–up. Agent: Rachel Coyne, FinePrint Literary Management.

December 15, 2013
Avery and Nora were best friends, drawn together by the fact that they were both adopted. After Nora dies, Avery feels partially responsible. The girls grew apart as Avery became a cheerleader and acquired a shell of popularity, willingly accepting superficiality in herself and her friends for appearances' sake. Nora, a true individual who's briefly though sympathetically sketched, had begun a challenging senior project, aided by her gently supportive friend, Brody: to locate her birth mother. The painful outcome of her search turns out to be too much of an emotional burden; right after passing on a journal of the quest to Avery--along with obvious clues to her desperate emotional state that Avery ignores--Nora kills herself. Avery, focused on how it might positively affect her application to Duke University, decides she'll honor Nora's memory by searching for her own birth mother. Avery has her eye on the bottom line, and she facilely, fluently lies to people around her if it advances her cause. This ultimately undermines her climactic revelation of the error of her ways. More effective is her wry, often sarcastic voice, which is sometimes hilarious, as when she describes her boyfriend's bumbling sexual advances: "[I]t felt like he was trying to start a fire Boy Scout style." An insightful, entertaining exploration of the impact of a suicide that may leave its audience uncertain about the sincerity of the protagonist. (Fiction. 14-18)

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December 15, 2013
Grades 7-12 In first grade, Avery and Nora discovered they had something in common: they were both adopted. But that shared bond wasn't enough to carry their friendship through the years to high school. When Nora dies of an overdose, high-achiever Avery thinks that the key to acceptance at Duke University is to finish Nora's senior project, which involved searching for her birth mother. However, Avery will search for her own. Her partner on the project, Brody, was also Nora's partner, and he buys into Avery's claims that finishing the project will honor their friend. A romance between opposites Avery and Brody, who seemingly has it all together, heats up, only to fizzle when Avery's secrets catch up to her. There's also Avery's birth mother, who could muddy the perfect project. Although the ending is predictable, Cook (Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood, 2010) delves into some interesting questions about what's really important in life as well as the challenges associated with self-discovery and determining how far you'll go to get what you want.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)