Would You (by Marthe Jocelyn)

Natalie plans to spend the summer working as a lifeguard, hanging out with her friends, and preparing to miss her idolized older sister, Claire, who is leaving for college. But everything normal suddenly ends when a car accident leaves Claire hospitalized in a coma. Natalie wonders how she can cope, when the person she most wants for support is her big sis. The "would you" game Natalie plays with her friends -- asking questions like "Would you rather lose all your hair or all your teeth?" -- turns somber: "Would you rather just die, or be alive and seriously brain damaged?"

It's easy to be deceived by this slim novel, either by appearance (a light read, divided by subtitles into brief vignettes) or by subject (a depressing story about death). It is, in fact, neither light nor depressing, but heartbreakingly realistic, with devastating insight into how one teen endures a tragedy. Eleventh-grader Natalie and her friends are believable teens, with true-to-life dialog and situations (as Natalie notes about her friend, who works at their hang-out restaurant, "It bites to wait on your friends.").

The author never veers into saccharine or falls for easy solutions. She finds exactly the right note even at the end, which isn't happy or sad: It just is what it is. "If you stick a hopeful ending on there, it'll be a total lie," Natalie says. There's no message about drunk or irresponsible driving; it's a pure accident on all accounts, despite the family's wish for someone to blame. Natalie's engaging narration (the private room at the hospital is "really just the Bad Effing News Room") helps her -- and the readers -- bear the unbearable. As she tells her comatose sister, "Even fathers break. It started with you, Claire, the one broken person. But there is never only one broken person."

Author: Marthe Jocelyn
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: July 8, 2008
Number of pages: 176
Hardcover price: $15.99