YOU'RE BREAKING MY HEART

A guilt-stricken 14-year-old Black girl in Harlem travels with her cousin and her brother’s best friend on an underground odyssey as she tries to make sense of her grief.

The murder of Harriet Adu’s older brother, Tunde, in a shooting at their old school fractured her family. Attending a new school, where her reputation as “The Girl Whose Brother Died” follows her, hasn’t made Harriet feel any less lonely. Even the presence of Nikka (her cousin) and attempts by Luke (Tunde’s best friend) to support her can’t blot out the guilt she feels over the last words she said to her brother during a fight on the morning of the day he died: “I wish you were dead.” The swimming pool, once the only place where Harriet felt safe, becomes strangely malevolent when an unseen force attacks her in the water. Soon after, a new classmate named Alisia arrives and, with her talk of people living in subway tunnels and stories that are “different the second time around,” seemingly offers Harriet a pathway to the absolution that she seeks. Visions of Tunde and a near-drowning lead Luke and Nikka to help Harriet figure out what’s going on. Although the backstory of the underground world isn’t sufficiently revealed, the genre-crossing elements and the story’s surreal fun house vibe will keep readers on the edges of their seats.

A highly original tale exploring grief and weaving together the realistic and fantastical.