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Three starred reviews!
A girl with cerebral palsy navigates loss, grief, and the aftermath of trauma following a school shooting in a world that wasn’t built for her in this “intimate, lyrical” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) novel in verse from Jamie Sumner, the acclaimed author of Roll with It.
There is a Before and an After for sixth grader Bea Coughlin. Before the shooting at her school that took the lives of her classmates and teacher and After, when she must figure out how to grieve, live, and keep rolling forward. But as her community rallies in a tidal wave of marches and speeches and protests, Bea can’t get past the helplessness she felt in her wheelchair as others around her took cover.
Through the help of therapeutic horseback riding, Bea finally begins to feel like herself again. And as she heals, she finds her voice and the bravery to demand change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sensorial verse novel by Sumner (Deep Water), a disabled eighth grader navigates trauma in the aftermath of a school shooting. Kind and outspoken Bea Coughlin, who lives with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, confidently advocates for disability accommodations at her small private school. When her teacher and several students are killed during a school shooting, Bea's sense of safety crumbles ("My loosened leg brace catches/ on the footrest of my chair/ and/ it's pinning me here!"). The novel is divided into four parts—"Seek," "Hide," "Heal," and "Hope"—that showcase Bea's life before, during, and after the event via narrative poems and letters addressed to an entity called Sir. Throughout, Bea struggles to understand the incident; intimate, lyrical verse relays her experiences, including her horseback riding therapy and feelings of claustrophobia at being indoors in the days following the shooting. It's an accessible and cohesive interpretation of what it means to live with grief and find a way to feel like oneself after tragedy, as well as an homage to young voices and their impact on society. Bea reads as white. Ages 10–up.
