Weepy Thursday

How had I missed Suzanne LaFleur's amazing book Love, Aubrey?  This past week I was trolling through my blogs looking for great books from 2009 that I might have missed and I kept coming across this one.  Delighted when it came into the library yesterday, I started it last night just before bed and finished it this morning.  It starts off with eleven year old Aubrey all alone in her house in Virginia, taking care of herself by making cheese and crackers three times a day and watching television.  Her mother left days ago, and there's an allusion to "an accident."  Her grandmother, Gram, worried that no one's been picking up the phone, takes the train down from Vermont and finds her granddaughter all alone.  The two return to Vermont, Aubrey's mother's whereabouts still a mystery, and the reader's given these flashbacks into Aubrey's family's pasts.  Like If I Stay by Gayle Forman, one of my favorite YA books from 2009, this is a book about a girl who has lost most of her family.  In If I Stay, the main character loses her entire immediate family in a car crash.  Aubrey still has her mother... somewhere out there, but it's to the same effect.  Both books are terribly sad reads, the kind you want to gobble up all at once for a good cry, not the kind you'd want to drag out over a week because the sadness is just that palpable.  Audrey finds a really fantastic friend next door to Gram's place in Vermont, Bridget, but their friendship is tinged with sadness because, like Audrey, Bridget has a younger sister, and there are moments between little Mabel and "Bridgie" that clearly just break Audrey's heart.  I don't want to give away any more of what happens in the book, because there are some surprises, but I want to say that it is easily right up there among my favorite middle grade reads of all time.  I can't wait to read whatever Suzanne LaFleur is working on next, I was that touched and spellbound by this book.