The Girl in the Mirror: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries

"It was April first, a trick!/ Mom's voice said Dad was dead./ He couldn't walk through that door./ I thought it was a joke," says high school senior Lizzie McLane, first seen in The Secret of Me (2007), in this introspective novel in verse about grief and biological origins. Nothing could be more devastating for Lizzie than her adoptive father's fatal heart attack: with the support of her parents, Lizzie was going to seek out her birth mother. Now nothing feels important. It's only through writing journal entries and poems, which range from free verse to pantoums, that she slowly feels her way through the darkness. With grace and honesty, Lizzie shares the blurry aftermath of her father's death%E2%80%94the wake, the funeral, and graduation, followed by a summer of numbing her pain with alcohol. Kearney tenderly explores Lizzie's anger, sadness, and ambivalence about her identity as she grapples with whether to risk being hurt by the mother she never knew or to approach the future without first claiming her past. Ages 14%E2%80%93up. (May)