Review by Booklist Review
Youngdahl's eloquent sophomore work celebrates love, loss, family, and the meaning of home. The summer before senior year, Caprice is hard at work on a tourism app for her hometown, dealing with her older brother, Beckett's, return from rehab, and grappling with post-graduation plans. In addition, she also has the attention of new-to-town River. Caprice is trying to be patient with Beckett, but his impulsiveness and controlling tendencies are getting on her last good nerve. Then, as senior year starts, a wildfire races through Sierra, destroying everything. Everyone is forced to evacuate and loses someone or something. Caprice and Beckett's beloved Gramps dies in the fire, and their home, which Gramps built, is gone. The app is now useless for tourism, but Caprice turns it into a vehicle for people to talk about the things they lost in the fire. It is a catalog of burnt things: a Talking Heads album, a prom corsage, clay pots made by children-- everyday, but precious, objects. These "catalog" stories are thoughtfully interspersed throughout the novel. Youngdahl based Sierra on her hometown of Paradise, California, and her narrative goes straight to the heart in lucid, well-crafted sentences. Caprice is complexly developed: stubborn but empathetic, loyal, and giving, and she is surrounded by a well-drawn, realistic group of characters. Full of heart and sure to have mass appeal.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Youngdahl (As Many Nows as I Can Get) draws on personal experience navigating the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed her Paradise, Calif., hometown to deliver a wrenching story of resilience and healing. Seventeen-year-old Caprice Alexander is at a crossroads: she simultaneously loves her Sierra, Calif., town and can't wait to graduate and leave for college. Things at home grow tense when her unpredictable older brother, Beckett, returns following months spent in a rehabilitation center for an alcohol dependency. Cappy resents Beckett and feels that his drinking tore their family apart. She distracts herself by diving into her personal project developing an app, hoping to use it to kick-start a career in tech. Then tragedy strikes when a wildfire devastates her town. Chapter titles serve as a countdown to the climactic event, and periodic interstitials narrated by various characters provide insight to happenings before, during, and after the fire. Cappy's first-person POV reflects her analytical mind, while parallel recovery journeys--following Beckett post-rehab and the citizens of Sierra post-fire--center family, friends, and community in this lengthy and visceral novel. The Alexanders are white. Ages 12--up. (Mar.)
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Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up--Seventeen-year-old Caprice Alexander has her life planned: design an app to attract tourists to her small California town (providing scholarship opportunities), attend college, and navigate her relationship with an estranged brother who is fighting an alcohol addiction. The story opens eight weeks before a large fire, with each chapter featuring letters from townspeople on burnt objects. The chapters following the fire focus on the Alexander family's attempts to cope with its aftermath. This is a tale of painful experiences and finding the good. An app for tourists becomes a place for locals to share memories, a town destroyed will be rebuilt, and families emerge stronger despite loss, with relationships begun and growing. Youngdahl attempts to take on numerous heavy and relevant topics. However, there isn't space to adequately address alcohol addiction, domestic violence, racism, anxiety, PTSD, wildfires, condom use, and death in a manner that is even-handed and coherent. Unfortunately, most of these essential topics receive a few sentences. There is an attempt at humor, but a hot-to-trot grandma interested in Caprice's high school boyfriend is off-putting. VERDICT The amount of sexual innuendo, dangerous situations, and strong language make this work for older teens and adults, and otherwise not an essential purchase.--Sarah Sieg
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A high school girl grapples with personal worries and the devastation wrought by the wildfire that engulfs her small town. Caprice Alexander both loves Sierra, California, beyond reason and hopes to escape it. While dealing with the stress of senior year, Cappy, who's white, is also developing an app she hopes will launch her career. At home, she tiptoes around her older brother, Beckett, newly sober after months in rehab. Written after the devastating Camp Fire of 2018 in the author's hometown of Paradise, this compelling novel has a highly effective narrative frame: The fire doesn't come as a surprise, but that early knowledge enhances rather than dampens the building tension as Cappy and her family (including their beloved gramps and gram) draw closer to the day that will change everything. Interspersed throughout are archival entries of items lost in the fire, each with an explanation from its owner of the object's significance. Besides cleverly tying to the book's conclusion, this structure makes the broader communal loss visible, enlarging the scope of the work beyond Cappy's individual struggles. Helping Cappy navigate Beckett's recovery process and the fire's aftermath are her best friend, Alicia Johnson, one of the few Black people in town, and her crush, River Parker-Holt, newly arrived with his moms and hoping to put down roots after dozens of moves. Smart and moving; a beautiful tribute to those living with the threat of wildfires. (content note, author's note, resources)(Fiction. 12-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
