THE ALCHEMY OF LETTING GO
Attempting to meld science, magic, and poetry into an uplifting mélange, this story instead labors through a flat-footed plot where little is earned and much is simply declared and whose characters are as two-dimensional as the dead bugs the protagonist collects. Seventh grader Juniper thinks the most important thing in life is science, and her one goal is to catch a Palos Verdes blue butterfly—an endangered species—to add to the collection she and her older sister, Ingrid, began before Ingrid tragically drowned two years earlier. On a class field trip, Juniper leaves the group to chase the butterfly and falls in the water. After being rescued, she finds a rock that glows green in her pocket. (Why? This isn’t explained. But apparently this rock can make plants grow.) Next, Juniper meets a talking lemur who lives in the run-down house next to hers. She also meets scientist and magician Artemis, who lives there too, and together they hatch a plan to bring Ingrid back from the dead. Juniper’s classmate Mateo, the new kid in town, loves poetry and also conveniently turns out to be a magician. Juniper’s first-person, present-tense narration is a series of staccato declarative sentences delivering unearned insights that fail to draw readers into the story. Juniper and her family seem to default to White; Mateo is cued Latine.
