There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends.

Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends.

A perfect match with Jen Bryant’s The Fortune of Carmen Navarro (2010), a prose refresh of the same classic tale, and a great choice for high-school theater productions. Factory workers and business owners, police officers and computer hackers, hip-hop and Bizet bring the stage alive in a script that comes complete with stage directions and cued sound effects. José is not a soldier here, but a love-obsessed police officer and Escamillo is not a bullfighter, as in the opera, but a 28-year-old rapper-turned-filmmaker who fancies himself “knee-deep in fantastic!” Ego as much as romance is the tie that binds here, and camp passion and operatic melodrama-with a hearty dash of Shakespearean sexual humor and innuendo-are the ingredients that make the story work.

Carmen is an 18-year-old factory worker, feisty and freedom-loving, the “brightest star in their universe.” She loves falling in love, but she is too independent to ever belong to a man for her, there’s no por vida. The elements are essentially the same as the opera, but they are updated to an American urban setting: present-day Spanish Harlem. This time, it’s a spin on Bizet’s Carmen, which in turn was based on a short story by Mérimée. As he did with Swan Lake in Amiri & Odette (2009), Myers takes a classic story and gives it a new twist and fresh voice.

Amiri & Odette by Walter Dean Myers