Seventeen year old Emily, was living a fairly normal teen age life  in Vermont before the accident. Her parents led busy lives working full time at the local nuclear power plant and she was going to school. She could have done better in school, and she had trouble making and keeping friends, and she wished her parents weren’t fighting  or drinking so much, but life was pretty normal, or at least what she considered normal.

But then the accident happened and everything changed.  Something happened at the nuclear power plant, and through human error or mechanical failure, the plant went into meltdown.  During the evacuation of the school, Emily overheard people talking about what had happened and the speculation that her father might have been “drunk at the wheel,” causing the meltdown and the catastrophic disaster that followed.  Unwilling to face the questions and accusations, Emily sneaks away from  the evacuation of the school and makes her way to Burlington where she lives on the streets, taking the name Abby Bliss, the best friend of Emily’s favorite poet, Emily Dickinson.

Her life might have just ended there, in a city park in an igloo made of leaves, tarp and ice and a slow decline into drugs or violence, but then she met Cameron, a nine year old boy also on the street, and a fierce protective instinct consumes her as she takes him under her wing, making her face into the tough decisions she had avoided until then.

Told in a first person narrative style by Emily and divided into two parts, “Before Cameron” and “After Cameron,” this is a story of a young woman struggling to come to terms with events way out of her control while bearing the brunt of  people’s instinct to place blame when disasters happen. Young and alone, living in fear of being found out, and unprepared for the tough life on the streets, Emily struggles to find normalcy in a world that is not normal, to find love where love is hard to find, and to do what is right even if it might cost her everything.

Bohjalian has captured Emily and her voice with startling accuracy and she jumps off the pages, alive in all her complexity. At turns you want to embrace her and her insights and tenderness and at other times you want to shake some sense into her!  She is strong and weak, loving and hateful, smart and stupid, just like we all are, and it is this very humanness which Bohjalian has captured so well that makes us care what happens and propels us to turn the page waiting to see what happens to Emily but also in some deep way to ourselves. This is powerful book about confronting loss and realizing that sometimes all you can do is close your eyes and hold hands and face into it.

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 Stars out of 5)

Recommend this book to: Keith, Marian, Lauren, Sharon and Ken

Book Study Worthy? Yes!

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