Delilah, 17, lives alone with her workaholic mom. She never knew her dad; he and her mom had a one-night stand that could have been more, but he left the next morning on a journalism assignment overseas and ended up killed. Things between Delilah and her mother aren’t great and she’s been getting in a lot of trouble lately, sneaking out to see Finn, accidentally stealing makeup from the store, getting bad grades at school, etc.
They receive news that her grandma has died and Delilah and her mom return to Red Falls, Vermont, to her mom’s childhood home. They haven’t visited Vermont since she was a kid when a huge fight erupted between her grandma, her mom and her aunt at her grandfather’s funeral. Now that her grandma is dead and her mom and aunt are the only living relatives she has, Delilah starts trying to unravel the mystery of that fight, along with the mystery of her mom’s younger sister who died shortly before Delilah was born. Along the way she is reunited with her childhood best friend, Ricky, who is now all grown up and goes by Patrick.
While Delilah is trying to figure out her family, she is also forced to figure out herself. We don’t get a big glimpse into who Delilah is before she shows up in Vermont, but we do know that she seems like someone who is lost, not sure who she is, and acting out to hide what’s really going on. While in Vermont she is forced to work on her relationship with her mother, as well as discover what true friends really are.
Rated: High. This is a book for teens and includes about 20 swear words (five of them the f-word). There are also references to relationships that are only based on physical attraction (whether or not they are having sex isn’t spelled out, but it could be assumed), there’s a scene where the character is undressing with a boy before they are interrupted, a character throwing herself at a boy (sexually) and there’s a retelling of an out-of-wedlock sexual experience that is fairly important to the plot of the book. But there is nothing descriptive. There is also one character who is a lesbian, but just her admission that she is, nothing more.
