If all goes according to family tradition, 17-year-old Ivy Milbourn of Maryland's Eastern Shore will lead an extraordinary though troubled life with her remarkable talents... and then die young. The only problem is, unlike the four generations of gifted women before her, Ivy hasn't found her one remarkable talent: "I'm on the swim team, but I'm never going to be an Olympic athlete. I'm an honors student, but I won't be valedictorian. Sometimes I write poems, but that's just to get the restless thoughts out of my head.... I am completely, utterly ordinary."
It's the summer before senior year, and Ivy--"a salt-and-sunshine girl"--is ready to take it easy, to resist the pressure her grandfather--an English professor who has cared for her since her mother ran off when Ivy was two--puts on her to find her brilliance. So when her mother shows up with two younger daughters who have been told that Ivy is their aunt, Ivy is thrown for a loop. Her fierce, spiky-blonde mother is toxic from the start, drinking all day and jabbing Ivy with barbed words: "You're the kind of people who drive everyone away." The one person Ivy seems not to be driving away is Connor, her grandfather's ambitious, kind, biracial protégé, whose muscled body happens to be covered in tattoos of his favorite poems, including Ivy's Pulitzer Prize-winning great-grandmother's.
Jessica Spotswood's (A Tyranny of Petticoats; the Cahill Witch Chronicles) complex, emotionally charged and engaging novel folds in family expectations, changing friendships, adolescent identity crises and a steamy budding romance--a perfect recipe for young adult fiction. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor