This Is Me Trying

January 22, 2024
Marie (You Don’t Have a Shot) traces the lasting effects of a teen’s death by suicide in this introspective novel. After spending three years helping to look after his grandfather, Santiago Espinosa returns to his small hometown of Greensville, Vt., for his senior year. He has not spoken with friend Beatriz since the two lost Bryce, their best friend and Bea’s boyfriend, to suicide shortly after Santiago moved away. Bea rebuffs Santiago’s apologies and overtures of friendship, having adopted an icy personality and goth style to mask her lingering pain. As the friends stumble toward reconciliation, Santiago grapples with his obsessive-compulsive disorder and his relationship with his selfish father, who has perennially neglected him to launch his music career, while Bea navigates panic attacks and avoids Bryce’s grieving family members. Though the plot occasionally feels jam-packed, Marie blends prosaic high school concerns over college, dances, and relationships with wrenching depictions of adolescents struggling to cope with a traumatic loss to deliver a tender portrayal of reconnecting after grief. Santiago and Bea are Latinx; supporting characters are racially diverse. Ages 14–up.

February 15, 2024
A pair of queer small-town teens grapple with the loss of their friend. As she begins her senior year, Beatriz Doughtery, who's Irish and Colombian, is still grieving her dead boyfriend, Bryce, who took his own life when they were in ninth grade. His death hangs over Bea and her diverse friend group; to cope, Bea has distanced herself, hiding under her newly adopted goth look. When Santiago Espinosa returns to Vermont from California to look after his abuelo and finish high school, Bea's furious. While almost everyone else welcomes him back, as far as she's concerned, Santiago has been MIA since the funeral, leaving her to make sense of things without her childhood best friend. But Santi has been struggling, too: When he left town, he wasn't on speaking terms with Bryce, and in the wake of Bryce's suicide, that's been an unbearable weight. Now, he's seeking the connection with Bea that he's lost. The story is told from both their perspectives, allowing readers further insight into Santi's and Bea's broken hearts. But the will-they, won't-they drama of forgiveness drags as Beatriz and Santiago circle around each other, their collective guilt and formidable lies gnawing at them. The impact of Bryce's suicide is prevalent throughout this novel, whose characters desperately try to reconcile themselves with their memories of a friend and urgently attempt to live in the moment. An overly introspective dive into the murky landscape of lies, love, and forgiveness. (content warning, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2024
Grades 9-12 Originally, they are four best friends: Santiago, Bryce, Beatriz, and Whitney. But then Santiago and Bryce have a terrible fight, and Santiago moves from their small Vermont town to California, returning only for Bryce's funeral after he dies by suicide. There he and Beatriz have a bitter confrontation, and Santiago returns to California, cutting off communication, until he agrees to return to care for his elderly abuelo and to reestablish ties with Beatriz. Readers learn that he is bisexual, while Beatriz is either queer or pan. The two gradually resume their friendship, which may grow into something more. Though readers never get to know Bryce or his motivations, he is omnipresent, and the novel deals, almost obsessively, with the impact his death has had on Santiago and Beatriz, told through their respective first-person narrations. Marie (Ophelia after All, 2022) has written a novel that, while successfully character-driven, may sometimes test readers' patience. That said, readers who enjoy emotion-charged stories will find much to like here.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.