“WHY DID YOU APPLY FOR THIS JOB?”

“Because I wanted it. I thought helping someone else might take me out of my head for a while.”

Amy’s head bent down as she typed for a minute. Then she rethought what she’d written, pushed delete, and typed something else. “THAT’S EXACTLY HOW I FEEL.”

There’s so much packed into this recently released novel, it’s like Stargirl meets Juno… meets Beautiful Life? Regardless of what this engrossing work of YA lit reminds me of, Say What You Will feels uniquely epic in the sweep of emotions and situations it quickly draws the reader into. While the characters and their situations can be very, um, adolescent, the insights they offer into human thoughts and needs are perhaps timeless; sometimes we end up saving ourselves by trying to save those we care about; sometimes silence, whether easy or hard to break, can corrosively persist between us if we default to passivity; sometimes we’ll push away those care about by trying to draw them closer.

If you spot this in a bookstore or have a moment to use Amazon’s “look inside” feature, give the first few pages a read. After I did, I had to read the whole thing and wound up being taken by it to unexpected places, including back to my alma maters.

When this book is turned into a major motion picture, Allison Weiss‘s “I Was An Island” must be in the soundtrack.