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Your next favorite book
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by Gráinne O'Brien
A YA verse novel about first love and friendship, lost and found.
Daisy can feel like a solo act at home. On the outside of her twin brothers' intense relationship, she leans towards her parents, particularly her father, for support. As a passionate classical musician, she is not wildly popular at school, but she has one close friend and a life filled with musical performance. Her life is turned upside down when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, and Daisy is left disconnected from her one true love, music. When she makes a new friend at school, mysterious Flora, Daisy finds a glimmer of peace in her chaotic life. Just as everything seems to be getting better, they all fall apart. Family tensions heighten as Daisy's dad falls ill and Daisy needs to decide should she find her way back to who she was or look towards who she is going to become.
For fans of Sarah Crossan and Elizabeth Acevedo.
"The verse's musicality is natural and a well-executed pairing with Daisy's talent. Each poem has a brilliantly aligned (and briefly defined) musical term as its title, and many of the poems play meaningfully with shape and form. O'Brien accurately captures a time in a person's life that is so fragile and overwhelming that it's nearly impossible to get just right. A tightly written, incredibly well-characterized work: bravo." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about Solo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gráinne O'Brien is a bookseller for Kennys, Ireland. She is the founder of Rontu Literary Service, a service dedicated to supporting writers of fiction for children as they seek publication of their manuscripts and one of the founders of Silver Apples Magazine, an online literary magazine entering its tenth year. She completed the MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick in 2018 and received an Irish Arts Council Agility Award in 2021 and 2022. She is a member of the Irish Booksellers Association committee and was named a Bookshop Hero by The Bookseller Magazine in 2022.
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