I see the jocks stretching in their muscle shirts and think about how their shoulder blades look like vultures’ wings trying to tear free. Written in 187 VERY short chapters- Maddie’s story of a 12yo girl who wakes up to find her entire town abandoned. The chapters flip back and forth in time and we see the trauma that Meridith faced that led her to her agoraphobia.

Alone is also a very personal narrative, one that covers friendship, sexuality, depression and ageing. Late one night Alice Creighton hears her father having an argument with a fairy - a snarling, bald beast with warts and needlelike teeth. Schreiber is interested in the gap between the life we live and the life that we imagined for ourselves. Maddie is left completely alone with only her neighbor's trusty rottweiler George to keep her company for four years!The descriptions of the lake and the snow and crisp air and empty houses when there are no background noises or distractions are stunning. Eavesdropping on a debate about cancelled bands, listening to a close friend’s explanation of his disturbing desires, facilitating a conversation about kinks at a party until it goes wrong, Moore’s narrator is less of a character than a witness of desperate disconnection. Much later, she fell out with her foster family, and Bart van Es - the grandson of Lien's foster parents - knew he needed to find out why.

From a spectacular career spanning almost three decades, these stories have become modern classics and are now for the first time collected in one volume.

When the looters came I thought they were her parents coming to look for her but then when I heard that they killed that kitten I knew that they weren't her parents. Alone is a novel in verse that tells the story of Maddie, a 12 year old who lives between her mother and father's house in a small town in Colorado. Dan barely had time for “bear charging” to register before it had him on the ground, altering his life forever.

The simple acts of survival are given to you exactly how they most likely would play out and without added sugar. That cannot be said of Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who has been described as 'our greatest living explorer'. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world. I think it was unnecessary to be so graphic, also there were a few curse words and my biggest complaint is how God was brought into the story several times in a negative way. I know Megan's work well, so I was unsurprised to find that the verse in this book is utterly gorgeous--simple, understated free verse that is, at the same time, incredibly powerful.

I am generally not a huge fan of novels in verse, but I inhaled this book in one sitting, my heart in my throat, and then sobbed at the end. Jack Phillips's allergy to sunshine confines him to the shadows, leaving him lonely, and at risk of life-threatening burns every time he steps into the light.