FIRMAMENT

A gripping page-turner of immense and surprising beauty. Fourteen-year-old Luke has been in a bad state for two years, since “Dad died and the light of his existence went out.” He’s bitter and angry, in trouble at school, and under the thumb of a gang. Their pressure to break into an old woman’s house leads Luke to discover Natalie, a hidden ten-year-old girl with a mental age of four. Natalie sobs and screams all night long; Luke hears it even from afar. He also hears “the sounds of fields and hills and hedgerows” and other sounds “that seemed to well up from deep inside him: a buzzing sound, a harp sound, a bell sound, and, all around his head, a sound of rushing water.” Like Dad, Luke’s a musical genius with a “deep ocean roar rolling inside him and around him.” He needs to save Natalie; he needs to escape the murderous gang; and he needs to make friends with the sounds inside him. Mystical, desperate, and deeply affective. (Fiction. YA)