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Summary
Summary
In Wild Awake, Hilary T. Smith's exhilarating and heart-wrenching YA debut novel, seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd has big plans for her summer without her parents. She intends to devote herself to her music and win Battle of the Bands with her bandmate and best friend, Lukas. Perhaps then, in the excitement of victory, he will finally realize she's the girl of his dreams.
But a phone call from a stranger shatters Kiri's plans. He says he has her sister's stuff--her sister, Sukey, who died five years ago. This call throws Kiri into a spiral of chaos that opens old wounds and new mysteries.
Like If I Stay and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wild Awake explores loss, love, and what it means to be alive.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kiri Byrd's plan for the six weeks her parents are away involves practicing for the upcoming International Young Pianists' Showcase, practicing some more, and then practicing with Lukas, her bandmate and crush, for their Battle of the Bands gig. She isn't worried about being home alone: she's 17, she's responsible, and she's got a schedule. But when someone calls to ask if Kiri will come pick up her dead sister's belongings, things change in unexpected ways. Kiri's life picks up speed and gets frighteningly close to flying out of control as she bikes to the rough side of Vancouver; meets Skunk, a musician and bicycle repairer; and finds out exactly how her sister, a troubled artist, died. In her YA debut, Smith (Welcome to the Jungle) handles Kiri's grief and joy well, then takes these emotions and amps them up. When people around Kiri-including Skunk, who has his own mental health problems-and Kiri herself begin to think that she "might be having a Thing," it's believable, worrying, and relatable. Ages 14-up. Agent: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Seventeen-year-old rocker and classically trained pianist Kiri is looking forward to practicing her art over the summer. These plans go awry when she receives a mysterious call to pick up some of her long-deceased older sister's belongings in a bad part of town: everything Kiri thought she knew about Sukey's life, her death, and their family begins to unravel. Kiri forms relationships with Sukey's troubled neighbor and with a boy named Skunk that change the way she sees the world -- and herself. At first it seems that Kiri is simply coming into her own, gaining wisdom, and accepting life's unpredictability, but soon it becomes clear that Kiri is also losing control. As her narration grows more frantic and less lucid, readers will suspect that there is more going on than just spiritual awakening. Aligned with this regression is her developing romance with Skunk, whose mental health is also questionable. Despite Skunk's paranoia and Kiri's apparent mania, however, what is never in question -- thanks to convincing dialogue and moving characterizations -- is the authenticity of their love for each other. Most fascinating in this stirring coming-of-age novel are the blurred lines between perception and reality, genius and madness, peace and turmoil. Debut author Smith embraces the complexities of grief, family dynamics, creativity, mental illness, and love and pens them with a thoughtful, subtle hand. katrina hedeen (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A young woman spirals into mania after hearing the truth about her sister's death in this flawed but heady debut. While her parents are on a six-week anniversary cruise, 17-year-old piano prodigy Kiri is responsible for watering the azaleas and practicing daily for the upcoming International Young Pianists' Showcase. But when a stranger calls claiming to have information about her deceased sister, Kiri abandons her disciplined routines and sets out to discover the truth about Sukey, since "[w]hen she died, it was like my house burned down." After learning Sukey was murdered, not killed in an accident as she had been led to believe, Kiri eschews sleep, takes drugs, goes on midnight bike rides, wins a battle of the bands and falls in love with a formerly paranoid-schizophrenic musician. Each questionable action brings her closer to closure over Sukey's death, but will she survive the summer? Though the secondary characterizations are sometimes sketchy, and the plot has some holes (would Kiri's strict parents really leave her alone for six weeks? Is Kiri suffering from delayed grief or true mania?), Smith's exuberant use of language helps gloss over them. Similes such as "[t]he piano is like a sleek black submarine that carries me deep, deep down, until the surface world is nothing but a muffled shimmer" sing off every page. Beautiful and energetic, if jumbled; Smith's a writer to watch. (Fiction. 14 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd is home alone for the summer while her parents are off on a cruise. Pretty early into her solo tenure, she discovers that her beloved sister, Sukey, wasn't killed five years ago in a car accident, as she had been told, but was murdered. The experience of dealing with the shocking truth causes her to tumble into a downward spiral, and Kiri's mental state is alarmingly called into question. She's a serious musician, preparing for the Young Pianists' Showcase, which means dedicated practice but soon she's not sleeping and manically playing at 5 a.m., while her thoughts go loud and then normal again. Through her relationship with Skunk, who suffers from mental illness, Kiri realizes she might be having her own psychological problems, or a Thing. Debut author Smith can craft a simile like no one's business, and her ebullient language drives this story, which captures moments of life at its highest and blurriest points: love, loss, music, freedom. And even though the reader may fear for Kiri, she is unabashed in how she lives her life, and it's both exhausting and exhilarating to watch.--Kelley, Ann Copyright 2010 Booklist
