Wish You Were Here

This ambitious debut touches on safer sex, death, self-worth, relationships, love and the meaning of it all. Jackson (Jax) has more than adolescent angst to contend with during his senior year: his best friend, Brady, runs away and leaves him feeling abandoned and betrayed; his mother remarries; his father, a freewheeling stagehand for rock groups, is almost killed in a fall; he meets Amanda, the girl of his dreams, during a vacation but falters in maintaining the romance. For much of the book, Shoup handles Jax's growing awareness of himself and others with grace and ease, even when many plot devices ring false. Amanda is unbelievably saintly, for example, and the marriage of Jax's father and Brady's mother seems a gratuitous touch while the suicide of Jax's ex-girlfriend on graduation day borders on soap opera. The ending, however, seems to belong to (or constitute) another novel: Jax is reunited with Brady (who has been following the Grateful Dead from concert to concert) and the two make a pilgrimage to Graceland, where they attend an candlelight memorial to Elvis. All of these experiences may have occurred in someone's life, but crowded into one book they seem disjointed and unreal. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)