Me, this great book, and the Dead

"Have you read Me, the Missing, and the Dead yet?" asked Megan from the Nutley library.

"No," I replied, "but it's on my list."

"You have to read it. It's REALLY good."

As we all know, I am easily influenced by recommendations from colleagues, especially when I can see how passionate they are about a book. I picked up Me, the Missing, and the Dead by Jenny Valentine thinking it might be a mystery, or an adventure. I was way off, but in a good way. Oh, and Megan was totally right.

The Plot: It seems like everyone these days leaves important things in cabs. I'm sure hundreds of people have left their iPhones. Yo-Yo Ma left Jacqueline DuPre's cello. And someone five years ago left an urn of human ashes in a cab in London, an urn which has lived on a shelf in a cab dispatcher's office ever since. Lucas, sixteen, can't forget about the urn once he sees it. He learns that the woman in the earn was named Violet Park, and everyone seems to know her except Lucas. She was a pianist, a painter, and a friend of Lucas's father, Pete, who disappeared five years ago. More than just a celebrity figure, she turns out to be a major piece in the puzzle of Lucas's life. Lucas connects to Violet as much as any teen in a book not about the supernatural can connect to a dead person. At the time Lucas is getting to know Violet, he's using information about her life to learn about his missing father. He wants to believe the best things about his father, even wearing his clothes and holding on to his possessions, but there are many gaps in his knowledge, gaps he tries to fill by reading his mother's diary and asking his father's longtime friend about his father, his mother, and Violet.

Why you'll love it: This idea of being fascinated, even driven, by a missing or dead person is nothing new. It's the plot of all of John Green's books to date, after all. But what Valentine does so well is break down the pedestal on which Lucas places his father piece by piece. In the end, Lucas doesn't hate his father, which would have been the easy thing to write, but he is confused and finds his father more complex than he did in the beginning. In missing his father, Lucas also feels that he is missing part of himself, a hole he tries to fill with Violet. "The missing" also includes his mother, sister, and brother, who are not missing physically, but have holes in their existences just like Lucas does. All of Lucas's research on Violet tells him some of what she is, but there were very few who knew Violet's quirks, her true personality. The discovery of Violet's influences on the people Lucas knows is startling and influential in a way that changes the way Lucas sees his loved ones. Lucas himself has an honest, clear way of both stating and seeing other people's emotions. I'm adding this to my list of great cerebral boy-centric books.