Lament by Maggie StiefvaterScholastic, 2011 (Originally Flux, 2008)

Deirdre, the sixteen-year-old narrator of Lament, plays the harp, and plays it very well. But she has an overbearing mother and a major case of stage fright, and she feels pretty much invisible at school: she has a best friend, James, who’s also a musician, but that’s basically it. But the summer between her sophomore and junior years, all her normal high school concerns become the least of her worries: some truly weird stuff begins happening, starting with the appearance in her life of a gorgeous boy named Luke, who she somehow dreamed about the night before meeting him at a music competition. She’s drawn to him, but she doesn’t know what he’s really doing in her life—and why he knew about her before having met her.

Lament is too plot-driven for me to want to say much about it, but there are faeries, and while Luke isn’t one, he’s a part of their world. And Deirdre, it turns out, can see them—and, indeed, has other paranormal abilities of her own. Meanwhile, with Luke, Deirdre’s discovering her own desires—often in terms of wanting to make out with Luke whenever possible, but also in terms of wanting to be her own person, instead of letting her mom or grandma or aunt tell her what to do, which she’s always just sort of accepted in the past.

A lot of people on Goodreads seem to have had issues with the instalove/lust between Deirdre and Luke, but that didn’t particularly bother me. I mean, I’m reading a paranormal YA romance; I’m partly reading it for the kissing, and if the chemistry feels believable, I can go with it. Some people also seem to really dislike Deirdre as a narrator/character, but again, I didn’t have that problem: I like how she goes from passivity to deciding things for herself, and I like her moments of humor and practicality, like:

What I needed to do was prioritize. If you took out the supernatural homicidal bits, this was just a problem like any other I’d faced: a super-hard school project, a tune that refused to be tamed, a musical technique that twisted my fingers. I’d tackled all those before by breaking them down into little bits. (311)

I don’t know if I’ll read the sequel, but I enjoyed Lament: it was a pleasing book to start reading in a coffee shop on Saturday, get sucked into on a train ride home from Philadelphia on Sunday, and curl up and finish on a cold and wintry holiday Monday when I didn’t particularly want to be anywhere other than my couch.