A Year to the Day

YA fiction

"On the morning of the first anniversary of her older sister Nina's death, Leo wakes up. looks at her mussed, tangled bedsheets, and bursts into tears."

     Bad things can happen on the most ordinary of days.  You're drifting along and something goes terribly wrong.  Life is suddenly split into before and after.  You'd give anything to cross the abyss, return to the innocence of before. But that's so not going to happen.

     That's the plight of Leo, protagonist of Robin Benway's A Year to the Day.  She, Nina, and East, Nina's boyfriend, had gone to a late summer party, Leo's first.   Nina has laid down the law on Leo drinking.

     "Are you kidding?  If you get drunk or if Mom smells beer on you, I'm a dead person.  She'll ground me until I'm until I'm thirty-five years old and basically a decrepit crone that lives in the den."

     They're on the way home when it happens:  "The world explodes and shatters into pieces that Leo will never be able to put together, no matter how hard she tries."

     Suddenly Leo has lost not only her only sibling, but her closest companion.  Her mother huddles in Nina's bed, not even showering.  Although they don't know it at the time, her remarried father and his wife are about to welcome their first baby, a girl.  At school the teachers respond weirdly to her and the other kids, not knowing what to say, often ignore her.  Grief books from well meaning but clueless relatives pile up, unread.

     Only one person gets how Leo is feeling, the one who also was there when they lost Nina.

     A Year to the Day covers the first year after Nina's death, only in reverse order, starting with a memorial event and ending right before the accident that took her life.  Leo's candid narrative gives incredible insight into how the unexpected loss of a beloved girl poised to take off to wider horizons effects a sibling, a family, a community.  I highly recommend it, especially to those who have lived through tragedy and those who love them.

On a purrrsonal note, I was about four years younger than Leo when my world shattered into before and after--when my sister, Harriet, was an ordinary, sometimes quite aggravating sibling and when she returned from the hospital after a bout with spinal meningitis, a shell of her former self.  Technically she is still alive in a group home in North Carolina.  But when I was eleven it was like the pod people movies they'd later produce.  It felt like my sister had died and some other entity had taken possession of her body.  And while Dad mentally checked out, Mom became determined to bring Harriet back to normal, church people said all the wrong things about God's will, and lots of people, not knowing what to say, said nothing, I was in many ways on my own too soon.

I'm sending a shout out to my many readers whose lives were at some point, including the pandemic, shattered into befores and afters.

Jules Hathaway 

     

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