growing up is so damn hard. 
 when this book comes out, i guarantee it will win all the awards and land itself on all the school reading lists. this book couches some pretty devastating life lessons in an alternate realm of dangerous magical fantasy, but it does so without ever once being cutesy. 
 hazel and jack have been neighbors and best friends forever. hazel was adopted from india as a baby by white american parents who have since separated, jack is the son of a woman who has retreated into this isolating fog of depression, and he has feelings of confusion and guilty resentment in response to the situation. to escape their lonely realities, hazel and jack create fantasy worlds around themselves where superheros play baseball and robots fight knights, but at the end of the day, they have some unpleasant realities to go home to. 
 and as time goes on, things change between them. 
 financial circumstances have forced hazel to leave her fancy progressive school and attend the same public school as jack, who must judiciously divide his time between her and his male school friends. this is the age when boy-and-girl best friends start to be an unusual occurrence, peers start to ask annoying questions, and mothers start trying to un-wild their daughters and encourage them to make nice young lady friends. 
 (view spoiler)[ although in hazel's case, the nice young lady friend actually sounds like someone you would want to hang out with and not just a pale substitute for how much fun she has with jack.they are doing more traditionally "girly" things like dancing and baking cookies, but with a manic edge to it, so it's not earnest and depressing. plus - awesome uncle. (hide spoiler)] 
 and then an intervention of magic occurs, changing jack - driving a wedge between himself and hazel that she cannot see and so cannot understand the sudden change in jack. and this intervention naturally leads jack into the path of the snow queen, who leads him unresistingly away to her snow fortress. 
 it could have been silly. it could have been trite, but it's not. ursu's writing is layered, making magpie references to literature both contemporary and classic, with good results. i am not usually a fan of pluck, but this imaginative, bookish, damaged, and -yes- plucky heroine really won my heart. her bewilderment comes alive, and brings back plenty of memories of feeling frustrated and feeling that everything was unfair and bigger than oneself. 
 of course she goes after jack. of course she has many adventures along the way. in a way it is selflessness, but more precisely it is self-preservation, because she is at the age when your best friend is part of your self, and to lose jack, she is losing the center of her world. 
 but, yeah, there's some baby-martyrdom here: 
 (view spoiler)[this may not be a spoiler, but it's a great line from page 282, so i am being better safe than sorry. hazel is confronting the snow queen, and is told: 
 "know this," she said, her voice as clear as a shard of glass. "if you take him away, he will change. and someday he will be a man, and you will not even know him, and he will only think of you with a passing smile." 
 at least he would think of me, hazel wanted to say. (hide spoiler)] 
 i love that. 
 this is a lovely, bittersweet tale of growing up and growing apart, and the way our selves are fragmented as we go. i am so grateful i was part of this "passing of the ARC" chain, and it is with great ceremony that i mail it off to meredith. enjoy!!