Dear Jennifer Sturman:

WHERE IS THE SEQUEL TO THIS BOOK? I do not care that this book has not even come out yet, I NEED THE SEQUEL. NOW.

(I have cookies!)

Serious cliffhanger ending in this here book, people, but I can’t use that fact to warn you away. In fact, I need to tell you to read it so that you can join me in my WHERE IS THE SEQUEL?? boat.

Delia’s mother T.K. is a Silicon Valley internet tycoon, along with most of her friends’ parents (and some of her friends). T.K. spends most of her time doing two things: working, and traveling the world with various environmental groups. It’s getting toward the end of the summer and T.K.’s away, so Delia’s looking forward to spending it doing something T.K. frowns upon: surfing (it’s not a “high-return use of scarce time”). But when she returns from surfing one day, she learns that T.K.’s ship sank without a trace, and that there were so survivors. The housekeeper, Nora, and T.K.’s business partner, Thad, expect Delia to be devastated, but Delia just can’t believe her mother is actually dead.

I mean, everyone else is uring the past tense when they talk about her, but it’s all a huge mistake. It has to be. I don’t know what happened exactly, but T.K. will explain everything when she returns. And I’m sure she will return. This is a woman whose favorite appliance is a label maker–she’s way too organized to die by just disappearing like that, and she’s much too determined to let a little thing like being stranded in the Antarctic do her in.

Delia’s actually more thrown by her mother’s will, which states that her legal guardian and her financial and academic trustee are to be her mother’s two sisters, neither of whom she’s ever met. Before she even has time to think about it, she’s hustled onto a plane and off to NYC, headed for the home of her Aunt Charley. Who turns out to be…flighty. Youthful. Energetic! (A bit of a lunatic?) They hit it off right away (although Charley doesn’t seem to agree with Delia that T.K. is still alive), and Charley buys Delia a NYC-appropriate wardrobe and makes plans for her to attend a “revolutionary alternative” school. Delia’s other Aunt, Patience, nixes this idea immediately and gets Delia into Prescott – the wealthy, uptown, uniform-clad private school that her children attend.

Soon Delia is navigating the halls of Prescott with the help of her new friend Natalie (and without the help of her vapid cousins), trying to figure out now-he’s-cool, now-he’s-snotty Quinn, and receiving mysterious, message-less cell phone messages. Her questions drive her to consult first a psychic, and then a private investigator, all the while hiding her actions from her aunts and getting more and more freaked out by everything.

AND THEN AT THE END THERE IS A BIG FAT REVEAL AND THEN THE BOOK ENDS.

I loved this. It’s such a great combination high school story/mystery. There are so few of these kind of books anymore. The high school stuff Delia goes through – leaving her friends abruptly, starting at a new school, feeling her way with a hard to figure out guy, getting through her classes, etc – is so well-done, so truthfully written. And then you’ve got the mystery on top of that, which is compelling and confusing and twisted and hard to predict. You’ve got interesting, funny characters, none of whom is one-sided (not even Aunt Patience). While everything around Delia is unraveling, you will be flipping pages as fast as you can, waiting for her to ravel it right back up again.

(Uh…not in love with the very busy cover, though. I don’t exactly hate it, but I don’t love it, either. It doesn’t really tell me anything about the book.)

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