Love, Life, and the List

January 1, 2018
A year ago, Abby confessed her love to her best friend, Cooper--and it didn't go well.Abby tried to laugh it off. Each pretends it never happened, but Abby's feelings are unchanged. She's doubly blindsided when her other passion, art, hits a roadblock. Her paintings are rejected for inclusion in an art museum show, deemed technically proficient but lacking in heart. Determined to turn that around, and with family brainstorming support, she creates a to-do list of activities to deepen her emotional expression, enlisting Cooper's intermittent participation. They watch a mountain sunrise, read books outside their comfort zones, audition for a musical, and more. Abby makes friends, including classmate and sculptor Elliot Garcia, and her work shows progress. Abby worries about her mother's agoraphobia; it's worsened during her father's long deployments overseas, especially since the family moved off-base, away from supportive military families. A refreshing departure from teen-literature tropes, Abby's no brainy polymath acing AP English (the book she chooses is A Tale of Two Cities) and destined for Stanford. However, plotting is shaky: subplots go nowhere; outcomes negate what came before. Cooper's friendly, romantic disinterest in Abby feels very real--its explanation and resolution, less so. Most characters are white or appear so by default. Elliot Garcia has dark, curly hair and a Spanish last name but lacks ethnic assignment. Abby's friends Rachel, who's black, and Justin, who's Latinx, are minor characters.Abby's likable, but her romantic passivity and hijacked artistic endeavors send a disempowering message. (Fiction. 12-16)

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October 15, 2017
Grades 7-10 Artistically gifted Abby has two goals the summer before senior year: getting accepted into the prestigious art show at the museum where she works, and getting best friend (actually secret crush) Cooper to realize he likes her as more than a friend. Expect a rocky road and stinging rejection on both fronts before Abby digs in and tries harder. Told her paintings have insufficient depth and heart, she, with the help of her mom and grandpa, composes an intriguing list of life experiences to enrich her artistic sensibilities: face a fear, learn a stranger's story, and try five things she's never done before, for starters. The list is a clever plot device to drive the story forward, and it offers surprises along the way. Readers will be touched by West's handling of the mother-daughter relationship, especially given Abby's mom's anxiety and agoraphobia, while the list, of course, tells all of us a thing or two about busting up routines and grabbing unexpected returns.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2018
When seventeen-year-old aspiring artist Abby is rejected from an art show for not having enough "heart," she curates a list of experiences (such as "see life come into the world") to help instill more passion into her paintings. Despite an unrequited crush, parental challenges (a deployed dad, an agoraphobic mom), and self-doubt, Abby's character grows from each to-do in this familiar but enjoyable story.

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