AND WE STAY
by Jenny Hubbard
Coming January 28,2014
Publisher: Delacorte BFYR/ Pages:
Find it on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads
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Award winner and critically acclaimed writer Jenny Hubbard's riveting account of a teenage girl whose boyfriend brings a gun to school and shoots himself. This is her story before, during, and after the tragedy.
When high school senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school library with a stolen gun, he threatens his girlfriend Emily Beam, then takes his own life. In the wake of the tragedy, an angry and guilt-ridden Emily is shipped off to boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she encounters a ghostly presence who shares her name. The spirit of Emily Dickinson and two quirky girls offer helping hands, but it is up to Emily to heal her own damaged self.
This inventive story, told in verse and in prose, paints the aftermath of tragedy as a landscape where there is good behind the bad, hope inside the despair, and springtime under the snow.
"In And We Stay, Jenny Hubbard treats tragedy and new beginnings with a skilled, delicate hand. Her otherworldly verse and prose form a flowing monument to all the great storytellers of the past." --John Corey Whaley, author of the Michael L. Printz and William C. Morris award winner, Where Things Come Back
IB Teen's Review of AND WE STAY
I will remember And We Stay and Emily for a long time after having put it down last night. I felt Emily residing somewhere in my chest as I read her story. It felt so personal, so ethereal, so damn sad it broke my heart. Paul broke my heart- the wonder of his thoughts, the confusion, and how damn alone he must have felt at the end. How terrible Emily's experience directly following his death & how patronized and bulldozed she was by her family- by her sense of fear and guilt.
But mostly I will remember those walks with Emily as she worked her way through her grief, made some kind of sense of her feelings, and discovered a new life. Half woman, half girl, discovering coffee and cigarettes this new amazing grown up things- after having discovered sex, pregnancy, death and disillusion. I will remember these walks with Emily much like I remember my walks with Holden Caulfield. So real I could taste these walks.
But mostly I will remember those walks with Emily as she worked her way through her grief, made some kind of sense of her feelings, and discovered a new life. Half woman, half girl, discovering coffee and cigarettes this new amazing grown up things- after having discovered sex, pregnancy, death and disillusion. I will remember these walks with Emily much like I remember my walks with Holden Caulfield. So real I could taste these walks.
