STAY WITH ME

Freymann-Weyr’s prose always has an incandescent intensity, never more so than when Leila Abranel tells how it was to live on the verge of age 17 after her much older sister Rebecca committed suicide. One risks loosing the knot of this Gordian narrative at one’s peril, because to recount all the things that happen doesn’t convey how impossible it is to put down. Leila is surrounded by affection and privilege: She loves her family, including her stepsisters and her father’s ex-wife; she lives in New York City after 2001; she attends a private school but struggles with dyslexia. Leila wants to puzzle out why Rebecca took her own life, and she does this via a dogged but elegant search that embraces assigned reading, her other half-sister Clare’s personal and professional life, the boy she grew up with and a man much older than she who, it turns out, loves her very much indeed. Strands of information about life in the city, hotel management, stage and lighting design and theater production are tucked in like shot silk in a tapestry. Simply exquisite. (Fiction. YA)