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Summary
Summary
What if you live for the moment when life goes off the rails--and then one day there's no one left to help you get it back on track?
Althea Carter and Oliver McKinley have been best friends since they were six; she's the fist-fighting instigator to his peacemaker, the artist whose vision balances his scientific bent. Now, as their junior year of high school comes to a close, Althea has begun to want something more than just best-friendship. Oliver, for his part, simply wants life to go back to normal, but when he wakes up one morning with no memory of the past three weeks, he can't deny any longer that something is seriously wrong with him. And then Althea makes the worst bad decision ever, and her relationship with Oliver is shattered. He leaves town for a clinical study in New York, resolving to repair whatever is broken in his brain, while she gets into her battered Camry and drives up the coast after him, determined to make up for what she's done.
Their journey will take them from the rooftops, keg parties, and all-ages shows of their North Carolina hometown to the pool halls, punk houses, and hospitals of New York City before they once more stand together and face their chances. Set in the DIY, mix tape, and zine culture of the mid-1990s, Cristina Moracho's whip-smart debut is an achingly real story about identity, illness, and love--and why bad decisions sometimes feel so good.
Author Notes
This is Cristina Moracho 's first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and tweets at @cherielecrivain.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Debut author Moracho takes a familiar setup-best friends with incompatible feelings-and examines it thoroughly and deeply. Althea and Oliver have been inseparable since they were kids. As they mature, Althea yearns for something more from their relationship while Oliver wants everything "to be normal." Complicating matters, Oliver suffers from an onset of Kleine-Levin syndrome, a rare illness characterized by extreme periods of sleep, memory lapses, and erratic behavior. During one of Oliver's episodes, he and Althea have sex, drawing a wedge in their friendship and causing her to act out violently. In what reads like a marked departure from the first half of the book, which is set in smalltown North Carolina, latter sections find Oliver in New York City, enrolled in a sleep study. Meanwhile, Althea attempts to track Oliver down but finds new friends and a stronger, more independent version of herself. Throughout the book, Oliver's reserve is an effective counterpoint to Althea's reckless responses to the teens' respective predicaments. Moracho wisely resists a storybook ending for these two, concluding with what seems like the next logical step in their lives. Ages 14-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Althea and Oliver have been neighbors and best friends since age 6. Now 17, their closeness has developed an expectation of which Althea is too aware, while Oliver seems willfully oblivious. Temperamental, unsociable Althea is afraid that she's the one who needs Oliver more, while affable Oliver wishes everything would stay the same. Compounding Althea's insecurity is Oliver's unusual narcoleptic-like condition, which causes him to fall deeply asleep without warning, for weeks or even months, leaving Althea painfully waiting for his return. After an awkward first kiss, an agonizing loss of virginity, and a messy break with Althea, Oliver goes to New York for a medical study. Althea follows, believing it to be her last chance to save their relationship. Though Oliver's condition acts as a plot device it's the catalyst for both characters it's presented with believable sincerity. Set in the 1990s, Moracho's coming-of-age story carries rare insight and a keen understanding of those verging on adulthood: fierce emotions and crippling insecurity mixed with a heady sense of limitless possibility. Or, as Althea puts it to her father while defending her questionable choices, Sweaty, queasy, weirdly euphoric. Suggest this pitch-perfect debut to readers looking for an older, edgier read-alike to Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park (2013).--Hutley, Krista Copyright 2014 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-This richly satisfying debut defies simple description. On its surface, it is about teenage best friends, a boy and a girl, who have complicated and messy feelings. Friends since they were six, the teens have grown up doors apart, both in single-parent families in Wilmington, North Carolina. What sets this novel apart is the way the youth are allowed to speak for themselves in all their chaotic, exciting complexity. Althea, who has anger issues, is in love with Oliver, which would be complicated enough even if Oliver didn't seem to be a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, falling into a strange, deep sleep at random moments and not waking up for weeks or months. Oliver's mom, Nicky, finds a doctor in her home city of New York who is conducting a study of this disorder, called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, and Oliver grudgingly agrees to participate. While he navigates the strange world of a hospital ward filled with other teenage boys with KLS, Althea tells her dad that she's taking a road trip to visit her mom in New Mexico, but then heads to New York City to find Oliver. Instead, she falls in with a collective house of crusty punks in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, who are perfectly described with deep familiarity instead of exotic detachment. Oliver's medical condition functions as both an interesting narrative quirk and a deeper metaphor, and the resolution is satisfyingly uncertain. The novel is set in the mid-1990s, which is vividly re-created with plenty of drinking, sex, and rock and roll, but it is the exquisitely created and painfully real, pitch-perfect characters who make it so memorable.-Kyle Lukoff, Corlears School, New York City (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
This ain't no fairy tale: This raw coming-of-age novel captures the listless wanderings of teens at loose ends. Althea is always waiting for Oliver to wake up. Plagued by a mysterious affliction that renders him nearly comatose for weeks at a time, Oliver's increasingly unpredictable absences test his lifelong friendship with Althea at precisely the moment that the mounting sexual tension between them reaches the limits of plausible deniability. After a particularly intense bout causes him to sleep through the summer before their senior year, he wakes to find that life has gone on both with and without him, with startling consequences. At turns gritty and gooey, Oliver and Althea's evolving relationship unfolds in a warts-and-all narration that alternates between the two, deftly capturing the purgatorial crossroads between youth and adulthood. Moracho's descriptions are vivid and arrestinga potent cocktail of speed and Southern Comfort "unbutton[s] [Althea's] diffidence like a blouse and cast[s] it aside" at a punk-rock concertwhich both grounds the story in familiar details and filigrees it with poetic flourishes. There is rich potential for crossover appeal here; while Althea and Oliver's fumbling progress toward maturity will resonate with teens currently in the angst-filled trenches, the characters' worldly-wise perspectives on their own histrionics will give adult readers reason to nod and sigh in appreciative recognition: Growing up is a messy business.Mesmerizing. (Fiction. 14 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
"It wasn't exactly how I pictured it, either," Althea shouts back. Her legs are shaking. "How do you think I feel? Do you think that's what I wanted?" "Then why did you do it?" Althea stares at him, knowing if he even has to ask, it's already over, she's already lost. "I don't think I could have stopped it. And if you could remember, you would know what I mean, and you would know that I'm right." Releasing her, he takes a step back, shaking his head. There's gravel in his voice, a roughness she's never heard before. "I'll tell you what I know. This, you and me, this is all just geography. If it had been some other little girl who grew up down the block from me, I would have been her best friend for ten years, too, until I realized one day that I wasn't sure I even liked her very much. You're like an incumbent president that no one can stand but you get reelected anyway, you have the advantage because you're already in and when someone's in it's so much harder to get them out." Excerpted from Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
