The voice of 12-year-old Jewel carries readers through this lyrical and buoyant debut from Crystal Chan. Her first-person narrative immediately plunges us into the heart of a family grieving the loss of their firstborn son.
"Grandpa stopped speaking the day he killed my brother, John," Jewel begins. "His name was John until Grandpa said he looked more like a Bird with the way he kept jumping off things, and the name stuck." But then five-year-old Bird jumped off a cliff, the little blue bath towel he'd used as wings discovered near his body, and Grandpa hasn't spoken since. Jewel was born on the day John died. Crystal Chan marries together the mystical beliefs of Jewel's father, rooted in his Jamaican homeland, and her mother's Christian theology in a union that produces tension for Jewel. In a family flattened by grief, Jewel often feels as invisible and mute as her Grandpa. She finds solace in nature, in a sacred space she creates near Bird's cliff and in a large tree on the McLarens' property, in Caledonia, Iowa. One day she discovers someone already occupying her favorite branch, who goes by the name of John. Is he real, or is he a duppy ("those Jamaican ghosts that Dad always worried about")?
Jewel must unlock this mystery for herself, as she investigates the origins of her grandfather's silence and the tensions in her parents' marriage. The pace occasionally slows when adults tell rather than show some key background information; the strongest points in the novel occur with the discoveries Jewel makes for herself. Chan's strong characterizations and her way with words make her a writer to watch. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness