To continue reading, please subscribe to hbook.com.
An individual subscription is just $72 and gets you a full year of unlimited access to everything hbook.com has to offer plus tens of thousands of reviews of recommended books published in the United States for young people. Subscribe today!
Our Guide/Reviews Database section is fully searchable by author/illustrator, title, subject, bibliographic data, rating, and keyword. Features include useful, timely, and topical booklists—curated by Horn Book editors and updated frequently—as well as the ability to save all your favorite titles to “My Library.”
To continue you need an active subscription to hbook.com.
Subscribe now to gain immediate access to everything hbook.com has to offer, as well as our highly searchable Guide/Reviews Database, which contains tens of thousands of short, critical reviews of books published in the United States for young people.
Thank you for registering. To have the latest stories delivered to your inbox, select as many free newsletters as you like below.
No thanks. Return to article
(2)
YA
In this novel set in the same world as The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (rev. 5/08), Lockhart explores the intersection between love and the multiverse. The summer between her junior and senior years of Alabaster Preparatory Academy boarding school, "middle-class white Jewish 'faculty brat' with a public school background" Adelaide Buchwald "would fall in and out of love more than once, in different ways in different possible worlds." In most universes, she is devastated by a break-up with Mikey Double L, her first love. In some, she is distracted from her broken heart by Jack Cavallero, a mysterious poet with a tragic past. In one, she falls for Oscar, a pianist with a great sense of humor but terrible timing. In every universe, Adelaide is big sister to Toby, her beloved brother and a relapsed addict. If she can heal that relationship, the pieces of her complicated love life just might fall into place. Readers will be able to keep the universes straight through the use of font changes and clued-in chapter headings. An appealing cast of secondary characters--which include an acerbic art teacher, a romance-challenged roommate, and, best of all, a motley pack of sweet dogs that Adelaide walks--serves as amusing examples of the types of relationships Adelaide should embrace or avoid. An offbeat, philosophical love story for those who enjoy pondering the mysteries of the universe or the heart.