Wrecked

Dear anyone who cared about Cameron,I was the driver of the "other" car.The police and my mother and father and plenty of people are saying that I didn't kill her. But I know I did. That's what her parents must believe. And my brother, Jack. He always sees what's true. I want to tell him how sorry I am about the accident. I want to say a lot of things to him and to everybody. Like how Cameron was smart and beautiful and kind in a way that isn't all that common in high school. Like how much Jack loved her and how sometimes I can hear him crying through the wall at night. I want to say how bad everything can get.In one split second.Upside down and shattered.Just like that.Wrecked.

Grade 8 Up–Anna is driving a very drunk friend home from a party. Moments into the journey, a head-on collision leaves Ellen with a punctured lung and other serious injuries, Anna with a lacerated eye, and the other driver dead. The dead teen happens to be her brother's girlfriend. Anna clearly remembers Cameron's final screams, and she suffers nightmares. Her father is an emotionally repressed tyrant who at first won't allow his daughter to receive counseling. Frank develops and sustains credible characters whose problems are realistic and interconnected. Brief flashbacks allow readers to become acquainted with Jack as he was before Cameron's death and even as he was when he and Anna were children. Their father's brittle personality is not evil or even cruel, but clearly riddled with flaws bred of deeply held fears. In spite of some plot twists that seem convenient rather than realistic, such as the teens' pre-Thanksgiving trip to Florida with Ellen's parents, this story is compulsively readable both because Anna is likable and imperfect and because Frank's writing is so fluid. Rather than being a didactic anti-drinking or pro-counseling story, this is a psychological drama that is definitely worth teens' time.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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Gr. 9-12. Returning to the mature voices and situations of Life Is Funny (2000) and America (2002), Frank's fourth novel dissects the suffering of teenage Anna, after she survives a drunk-driving accident that leaves her brother's girlfriend dead. Despite a premise that seems plucked from a problem novel, Frank departs from cliches in her portrayal of Anna as an essentially responsible kid (the other driver was drunk) and in her focus on how tragedy can magnify preexisting conflicts. Other elements receive less-nuanced treatment: Anna's emotionally abusive father's explosions of irrational fury seem caricatured, and subplots dealing with homophobia and alcoholism seem insufficiently developed. Frank may also lose readers in the rambling passages stemming from Anna's guided-visualization therapy. Even so, it's fascinating to observe how a proven author can transform a basically sensational plot, even in limited ways. YAs won't soon forget Anna's moving articulations of "panic spreading through [her] blood, like ink in water," or her inability to banish flashbacks to the late-night drive that ended, horrifically, with "screaming, stopped." Jennifer Mattson
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