Elizabeth Acevedo, author of the National Book Award-winning The Poet X, writes a tremendously impactful story in her fourth YA novel, Anger Is Only a Shadow, about a teen with an arrest record.
Two months ago, 17-year-old "Indigenous Salvadoran and Afro Dominican" Lil noticed her 20-year-old brother, Aldwin, acting strangely: closing all the blinds, talking to himself, looking paranoid. She kept it a secret, not wanting to worry her already stressed and cash-strapped family. To release her scorching tension, she took a joyride in her mom's food truck--which she accidentally wrecked. Now, after a week detained in the Youth Services Center, Lil is released to her parents with an ankle monitor. She tells them about the changes in Aldwin, away at college in Virginia, but he refuses to see them and the university won't intervene. Lil can't leave Washington, D.C., to visit Aldwin herself, and she feels overcome with helplessness: "My body needs to go go go." New Lil, who "follows the rules, keeps her head down," fights Old Lil, who wants "a way to feel something else," over how to relieve the mounting pressure inside her when the possibility of jail time looms.
Lil's moving first-person prose narrative, elevated by her precise and audaciously voiced diary-in-verse, tells of an enormously supportive family--of "the moldability of a love that spackles over the deepest flaws and cracks." Lil channels Aldwin's acts of kindness and ferocious familial loyalty as a guide to help him the way he has always helped her. Acevedo incorporates figures from Salvadoran, Dominican, and Taíno myths who parallel her characters in this moving story about a closely connected family. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer