I enjoyed this a lot. It's a good book about dealing with grief and also about running, and we all know I love to read about running, so obv that would stick with me.

Honestly, I think it would've been five stars if the dude hadn't sorta solved everything for some weird reason (why?) and then everything became fine because he helped her. I liked how she was "fixed", I just didn't like that it was him basically forcing her to do it.

But it's no Jag lever, tror jag ;) ( )

I'm a longtime admirer of author Joyce Carol Oates, and am in awe of her work ethic. She has written dozens and dozens of books over a career of over fifty years. My problem is in reading her books. I have often found them impenetrable, even the bestsellers. I gave up on her novel, THEM, when I tried it back in the seventies. Same thing with WE WERE THE MULVANEYS. But I did finish BLONDE, her short novel about Marilyn Monroe, and A WIDOW'S STORY her memoir about her life following the sudden, unexpected death of her husband. What I didn't know was that she'd also written some YA novels, and this is one of them. AFTER THE WRECK, I PICKED MYSELF UP, SPREAD MY WINGS, AND FLEW AWAY is a very long title for a very quick and very compelling read. The narrator is 15 year-old Jenna Abbot, a physically and emotionally scarred survivor of a horrific auto accident which killed her mother. After a long and painful recovery and rehabilitation, she refuses to go live with her remarried father's "new family" in California, choosing instead her aunt's family in New Hampshire. Tortured by grief and survivor's guilt, Jenna makes some bad choices in friends, and gets into drugs and alcohol and an older crowd, all of which nearly kills her, and more than once. Her "savior" is an older, black-leather-jacketed-motorcycle-riding boy nicknamed "Crow," who is not at all what he appears to be.

Oates has somehow mastered the voice of her young protagonist and the pace is brisk throughout the book. I was immediately hooked, and finished it in just a couple sittings. I don't read many YA books, but this one was literally quite mesmerizing. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

I did not like how Jenna was "saved" by Crow (both from the senior boys and from her phobia of bridges) or how she panted after him, never realizing how he was no better than the people he hung out with. Crow doesn't get much characterization, either. He just says the magic words and she is saved. ( )

What is there about this author that clearly wants to drag her stories into the ever darkest abyss?

Jenna is 15 and very close to her mother. Unfortunately on a sunny day while driving over the Tapanzee bridge, Jenna sees an object, commands her mother to stop and perhaps grabs the wheel, causing the car to swerve into the oncoming lane right into a truck.

Neither the driver of the truck or Jenna's mother survive. Badly broken, the story begins with Jenna in the ICU trying to make sense of just what happened and wondering if she was responsible for the death of two people.

Her father is a first class jerk who left the family years before, ran off with a younger babe and never will win the father of the year award. He is portrayed as someone who could look at the broken body of his daughter and decide to try to physically abuse her? After months of pain, Jenna leaves the hospital to live with a beloved Aunt and her caring husband.

A new school, new mother and father figure, two young cousins, , a new town, the loss of a beloved mother wherein Jenna blames herself and is supremely withdrawn, and no one gets therapy for this kid until she hangs with the wrong kid and has a wicked overdose on drugs?

Oates portrays the surrogate family as a wonderful, caring, perhaps over the top in acceptance. Yet why then depict them as slow to get help for her? I liked the beginning of the book and Jenna's admirable struggles to climb out of the wreck of her body and start a new.

Then, mid way through the ending, I grew to dislike Jenna and dislike Oates' writing.

Everything seemed plastic and over the top. It is obvious Oates struggled with YA genre.

No Stars for this one.

This is the first full novel I've read from JCO. I've read a couple of her short stories, and mostly liked them, but this? This showed me that Oates probably doesn't talk to people much (because her dialogue is awful), particularly teenage people (because every other sentence is punctuated with "I guess"). In the prose sections, it was okay, but once she got into the dialogue again, she retained the same flowing rhythm of the text--which nobody uses in speech, particularly high schoolers.

Writing style aside, there are a few plot holes. For starters, the narrator (Jenna) was in a car accident in May in which her mother was killed, so now she lives with her aunt and uncle in New Hampshire--but it's not until an accidental overdose at Christmas that the aunt and uncle put her in therapy.

On the whole, Jenna's reactions are probably genuine; they seem true to how a girl would feel and act in the wake of such an accident. (However, responding to many statements with "but this is AFTER the wreck" or "that was BEFORE the wreck" gets irritating). Unfortunately, true and accurate responses don't always make for interesting reading.

Also: how did I end up with TWO books at the same time that feature track runners, both of whom compete in the 800m sprint? ( )