Like Glass is the latest from my fave Jen Ferguson. I’ve loved her past books and Like Glass is unlike anything I thought. It’s a story about family and forgiveness. Keep reading this book review of Like Glass for my full thoughts.
Summary
When Tatum Nova Lambert boards a plane to Chamonix, a town in the French Alps, she has one half-formed plan: to drag her Michelin-star-winning dad home. Since her older sister Bronwyn’s death a year ago, Tate and her dad don’t talk. They barely even text. So when he doesn’t pick her up at the transit station like he said he would, it’s no surprise.
What is a complete and very unwelcome surprise? Her dad is unexpectedly living in Bronwyn’s apartment, and Tate discovers she’ll be sleeping in her sister’s bed—the one Bronwyn died in. In the apartment and at her dad’s restaurant, it’s hard to bear both her dad’s broken promises and her sister’s ghost.
While trying to untangle the secret life Tate’s sister left behind, Tate meets Agatha, a schedule-obsessed Olympic ski-jump hopeful, and Beetle, a pickpocket and general teenaged dirtbag. As the unlikely trio explore in the mountains’ shadow, Tate brings her distinct kind of chaos to everyone’s lives—all while she tries to figure out if she can forgive her dad and her sister for leaving her behind.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Like Glass begins as a story about forgiveness and wondering if we can ever grant it. About these hurts, the ways our family loves us and also wounds us. How we can feel so left behind even as we are loved, so alone as we are supposedly protected, and the human faces behind the titles of sibling or parent. It’s hard to see the flaws in our family, the ways they are trying the past they know how and still failing. And that’s okay to be hurt and to see their failure, but also to love them and see their pain. Like Glass explores identity, how it feels to have to perform identity and what it’s like when we have to cater to someone’s expectations.
To wonder how one embodies our identity in art and life without falling into this worn trails and still remain true to ourselves. Like Glass explores ambition. How it can require us to give it all up, even a respect of ourselves, but is it worth it? Are our dreams worth the loss, the sacrifices? With interludes of her sister, Like Glass functions as a mystery, asking what happened to her sister and these secrets. The ways grief and loss can introduce these new mysteries and ask us if we truly know someone. The gap between who someone was and who we thought they were. Like Glass is introspective in its exploration of grief and new beginnings.
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Find Like Glass on Goodreads, Storygraph, Blackwells, Bookshop. org & Libro. fm.