Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 01/01/2014 *Starred Review* Cadence Sinclair Eastman is the oldest grandchild of a preeminent family. The Sinclairs have the height, the blondness, and the money to distinguish them, as well as a private island off the coast of Massachusetts called Beechwood. Harris, the family patriarch, has three daughters: Bess, Carrie, and Penny, who is Cadence’s mother. And then there is the next generation, “the Liars”: Cadence; Johnny, the first grandson; Mirren, sweet and curious; and outsider Gat, an Indian boy and the nephew of Carrie’s boyfriend. Cadence, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat are a unit, especially during “summer 15,” the phrase they use to mark their fifteenth year on Beechwood—the summer that Cady and Gat fall in love. When Lockhart’s mysterious, haunting novel opens, readers learn that Cady, during this summer, has been involved in a mysterious accident, in which she sustained a blow to the head, and now suffers from debilitating migraines and memory loss. She doesn’t return to Beechwood until summer 17, when she recovers snippets of memory, and secrets and lies—as well as issues of guilt and blame, love and truth—all come into play. Throughout the narrative, Lockhart weaves in additional fairy tales, mostly about three beautiful daughters, a king, and misfortune. Surprising, thrilling, and beautifully executed in spare, precise, and lyrical prose, Lockhart spins a tragic family drama, the roots of which go back generations. And the ending? Shhhh. Not telling. (But it’s a doozy).HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lockhart’s latest is unlike anything she’s done before. With a Printz Honor to back her, plus a major marketing campaign—and a promotional quote from John Green—this is poised to be big. - Copyright 2014 Booklist.

School Library Journal - 04/01/2014 Gr 9 Up—Cadence Sinclair Easton comes from an old-money family, headed by a patriarch who owns a private island off of Cape Cod. Each summer, the extended family gathers at the various houses on the island, and Cadence, her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and friend Gat (the four "Liars"), have been inseparable since age eight. During their fifteenth summer however, Cadence suffers a mysterious accident. She spends the next two years—and the course of the book—in a haze of amnesia, debilitating migraines, and painkillers, trying to piece together just what happened. Lockhart writes in a somewhat sparse style filled with metaphor and jumps from past to present and back again—rather fitting for a main character struggling with a sudden and unexplainable life change. The story, while lightly touching on issues of class and race, more fully focuses on dysfunctional family drama, a heart-wrenching romance between Cadence and Gat, and, ultimately, the suspense of what happened during that fateful summer. The ending is a stunner that will haunt readers for a long time to come.—Jenny Berggren, formerly at New York Public Library - Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Bulletin for the Center... - 06/01/2014 The eldest granddaughter in an obscenely wealthy New England family, Cadence Sinclair spends summers on their private island. There she’s fascinated by, and later in love with, a boy named Gat Patil, the nephew of her aunt’s dark-skinned Indian boyfriend who joins the cousins for the summer holidays. Cadence is incensed to learn that her grandfather is firmly prejudiced against both Gat and his uncle in ways that will affect the dispersal of the family fortune; meanwhile, Cadence’s mother and her aunts, all vying for the inheritance, shamelessly attempt to use their children to sway their father’s decision and propel the family toward the tragedy at the heart of the book. With Cadence as a fully unreliable and sometimes distancing narrator who has suffered a trauma that she can’t remember, Lockhart weaves a solid tragic story; the events leading to an irreparable and deeply sad event are spooled out in poetic prose interspersed with dark fairy-tale insets that bitterly explore the festering stink of old money, simmering sibling rivalry, and impossible mixed-class romance. The YA twist here is the currently popular device of lost memory and mental breakdown in the aftermath of a horrific event, and while savvy readers will figure out the main trick long before the reveal, the details are still engaging and the inciting problems worth consideration. Given the subject matter, this will pair well with the usual high school canon fodder; readers may not relate to Cadence any more than they do to Gatsby’s Daisy, but the distance imposed by her self-consciously artful storytelling allows for sustained reflection. KC - Copyright 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.