Once, in Lourdes

March 13, 2017
It’s 1968, and, with the Vietnam War dominating headlines, four high school outcasts in Lourdes, Mich. make a suicide pact in Solwitz’s (Bloody Mary) honest and soul-baring novel about choice, fate, and the consequences of youthful idealism. Kay, Vera, C.J., and Saint give themselves two weeks to complete everything they want to do before they jump off a cliff together. The metaphor of standing on the edge of life runs throughout the narrative, as each of the friends contends with both childhood desires and the pull of adult responsibility. C.J., who has never felt comfortable as the brilliant high school heartthrob, is ready to let his true colors show, but his father is dead set on sending him to the perfect college. Kay, whose weight seems to be the only thing that anyone sees when they look at her, feels she doesn’t fit in anywhere, even in this new pact. Saint has to work to support his family, but he craves a higher enlightenment and escape. And Vera has a dark secret she’s hiding from everyone. The four find a total sense of freedom in their pledge, letting their feelings shape their actions. Kay cuts summer school, Vera does hard drugs, C.J. expresses his feelings for another member of the group, Saint gives in to his anger, and they all come together in unlikely ways. Although the pact hastens their growth into adulthood, finding oneself this wildly doesn’t come without consequences. A dark novel that knowingly depicts the confusion of being a teenager and the strong bonds of friendship that form at that young age.

March 1, 2017
In the summer of 1968, four teenagers in the town of Lourdes, Michigan, make a suicide pact.Kay's mother committed suicide when Kay was 11, and Kay is 40 pounds overweight. Vera has a deformed hand and sleeps around. Saint moved to town from Detroit, where he was "rats-in-the-basement, trouble-paying-the-rent poor"; now his mother works as a maid and he flips burgers. CJ, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, likes to wear a dress. One afternoon in the park, this foursome interrupts their bridge game to make a suicide pact--in two weeks' time, on Vera's 17th birthday, they will leap from the bluff over the lake to their deaths. "With the Pledge, we might have seemed to be courting death, but it was also joy we were after. We wanted to feel our birthright, what we thought other, happier people felt--the sense of endless possibility, the world shimmering around us. To dance beneath the diamond sky." Though they do manage to take in a baseball game and Kay loses 10 pounds in 10 days, generally things only get worse for the troubled teens during their fateful fortnight. Drugs, incest, physics exams, annoying parents, police brutality--and just when you think it can't get any worse, a loaded gun shows up on the scene. Solwitz (Bloody Mary, 2003, etc.) may have dumped one complication too many into this uneven, unnerving, and unrealistic plot. Lots of drama.

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Starred review from April 1, 2017
It's the summer of 1968 in Lourdes, Michigan, and four teens have forged a bond and found sanctuary along towering bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan. Their ringleader is lithe and fearless Vera, marked by a strangely deformed hand. Kay is sweet, creative, overweight, and grief-stricken after her mother's suicide. Wealthy and caustic CJ is struggling with his sexuality. All three are infatuated with Saint, a conflicted housekeeper's son who seeks guidance in Buddhism. Vera has been coping with abuse from her cop father, but a new family complication of mythically tragic proportions goads her into convincing her three friends to join her in a solemn pact: in two weeks they will end their lives by leaping into the lake. The turbulence of adolescence was also the subject of award-winning Solwitz's first novel, Bloody Mary (2003), and, after writing a spate of short stories, she returns to the longer form with a ravishing sense of place, electric eroticism, and a heightened, almost surreal, feel for how intense emotions alter our perception of the world, especially in youth. Solwitz's surging, many-threaded, complexly insightful tale dramatizes not only personal crises, but also the violence of the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Timely and timeless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)