Lila and Robert married and had three daughters
together. After they divorced, each of
them remarried and had an additional child each with their second spouse – Sasha and Ray – who were born
around the same time. Now both
seventeen, Sasha and Ray share the same half-sisters and even the same room at
the beach house on Long Island.
However,
the antagonism between their once-joined mother and father keeps them forever
separated. As a result, they have never
crossed paths. But ironically, their
shared blood ties link them together nonetheless in an intimate way that
borders on incest. Meanwhile, the
artificial (and legally-driven) isolation of the two families – sharing space
but never at the same time – obscures scars and wounds that only a tragedy can
break open.
Ostensibly not a
YA novel, this book gets picked up as such because of Brashares’s Traveling Pants series. The most YA-ish part is the somewhat touching (but more than a little creepy love story) between Sasha and Ray. But the novel is really about family and how
blood lines and even living arrangements don’t define it. It’s a moody and lyric work (and a bit hard
to track at first, thanks to all of its characters), but a decent heartfelt
story about divorce and its aftermath. It's not a children's book.
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