7) Where She Went

Forman, Gayle. Where She Went. New York: Penguin, 2011

Annotation: Mia and Adam where inseparable in high school. After a horrible accident, Mia walked out of Portland, and Adam's life forever. Three years later Adam has become a famous rockstar, but the memory of Mia is eating away at him. Their reunion will change everything.

Reason for Nomination: Gayle's Where She Went speaks with total confidence to all those who have love and lost and learned to love again, full of characters that are both believable and memorable, and built on a time-skipping structure that makes makes the story jump off the page.

The core genre is a romantic love story, but it's also a story of arrested (emotional) development. While it is certainly classifiable as a teen novel, the main characters are are both 21 in the main thread of the story. However their sudden break up has left both of them with unrequited needs - and has put their natural progression on hold. So much of the personal growth that would be naturally contained in a teen love story instead plays itself out a little later, with the added complication of making sense of the end of idealize teen romance.

The characters in the novel are thoroughly endearing, so much so that it's impossible not to root for the leading couple. The speak honestly at times, and in misleading self-lies at times - accurately mimicking the reality of the teen mind in love. These two also contain a great deal of teen wish-fulfillment - one a A-list rockstar, the other a Juilliard Cello prodigy. The book also reminds us that the event famous and powerful are still people who have the same problems as everyone else.

Structurally, the novel jumps back and forth between the last few months of their high school romance, and the first days of their post teen reconnection - with a little of Adam's interim years. Told from Adam's first person persecutive, each chapter also begins with lyrics from his pop-rock album, which adds a poetic preface to the each beat of the story, and breaks up the prose nicely. Each chapter is paced briskly, and the developments are full of very motivated but honest moments.

Most importantly, this is a rare romance novel that can work equally well for both boys and girls. The joy and pain of being a teen who loses the one believed to be 'the one' is perfectly etched here, but so is the promise that there is always a tomorrow. What tomorrow holds the novel doesn't have to say, but the readers will have no doubt that there will be one.

Genre: Printz, Romance, Edgy Fiction