![]() ![]() ![]() So I thought, “Why don’t I just focus on the first year of grief?” That first year is so fraught. ![]() I spoke with Megan Miranda, whose book All the Missing Girls was constructed that way, and she told me to keep it as simple as possible, because you’re already asking so much of your audience. I knew I wanted to write about two sisters, one of whom either dies or goes missing. But I first got the idea a few years ago. I went to stay with family out of state for a long time during the pandemic, and I started writing it because there really wasn’t anything else to do. Was there ever a point when it felt like too much to write about grief? You wrote this novel at the height of the pandemic. The result is a complex, moving, and occasionally funny story of loss and love and connection. The narrative unfolds in reverse chronological order, beginning a year after Nina’s death and working its way back to the tragedy. Leo doesn’t recall the accident, but East does, although he won’t tell Leo what he remembers. In it, a teenager named Leo grieves the death of her sister Nina, killed by a drunk driver in a car accident that Leo as well as Nina’s boyfriend, East, survived. Five years later, Benway is back with a new young adult novel, A Year to the Day. Robin Benway thought her 2017 novel, Far from the Tree, was going to be, she says, “the end of my career.” Instead, it won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. ![]()
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