Isabelle Day Refuses to Die of a Broken Heart

June 22, 2015
St. Anthony (Grace Above All) packs substantial emotion into a slim volume as she introduces eighth-grader Isabelle Day, who has moved from Milwaukee to Minneapolis after her father dies. Isabelle isn’t happy about having left her best friend behind, not to mention her family’s three-story house, a far cry from the duplex she and her mother now share with two nosy landladies. Isabelle’s worries, skepticism, and sense of humor (“Life was complicated enough without two crones asking her questions or pinching her arm to see if she was plump enough to push into the oven for dinner”) make for a lively read. The story is set in the 1960s, though St. Anthony keeps the period details light, leaving it to readers to pick up on references to TV shows like The Twilight Zone and The Guiding Light. Slowly, Isabelle recovers from her trauma (readers learn how her father died toward the end of the novel) and embraces new people and experiences. Well-drawn characters distinguish an understated story about facing loss and keeping an eye out for moments of brightness during difficult times. Ages 10–up.

June 1, 2015
Although spunky Isabelle refuses to die of a broken heart, sometimes it seems like it might happen anyway. The source of her heartbreak is the death of her father, which is complicated by the resulting move from her childhood home of Milwaukee to Minneapolis. She's enrolled in a new school, with all the usual discomfort that can cause. She and her mother are having a hard time communicating, and this is not helped by the fact that their new apartment is upstairs in the home of elderly sisters Flora and Dora, who seem to Isabelle to be inordinately meddlesome. Margaret, a classmate who lives with her boisterous family across the street, and her best friend, Grace, reach out to Isabelle. It's only slowly revealed that it isn't just her father's death and constant reminders of his absence that are causing Isabelle's grief and even anger; he committed suicide, and she found his body. St. Anthony revisits some of the characters from her previous two outings, Grace Above All and The Summer Sherman Loved Me (2007, 2006), and sets this story likewise in the 1960s. Each character is finely delineated, contributing to the plausibility of Isabelle's situation. Gently depicted incidents of everyday life believably provide a balm for Isabelle's aching soul. Stories for the middle-grade audience that deal with the suicide of a parent are few, and this one, sensitive but never syrupy, stands out. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2015
Grades 6-9 The author of The Summer Sherman Loved Me (2006) and Grace above All (2007) offers here a companion novel focusing on friendship and grief. Fourteen-year-old Isabelle Day and her mother have moved to Minneapolis following her father's death. Isabelle soon establishes tentative friendships with Margaret and Grace, characters from the earlier novels who attend her Catholic school, but the secrecy surrounding her dad's death keeps Isabelle from completely trusting the girls' rapport. The Days' overly attentive, elderly landladies also feature in the story, providing their own examples of companionship and sorrow. Set in the early 1960s, St. Anthony's fictional world may feel odd to modern readers, who will likely miss cultural references and not fully comprehend the historical prohibitions against suicide in Catholicism. In the end, no explanations about her father's death are given, but revealing his suicide to her friends helps Isabelle turn the corner on her own grief. A thoughtful, often somber story, this will be appreciated most by fans of the earlier novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)