If Birds Fly Back – Carlie Sorosiak

       If Birds Fly Back – Carlie Sorosiak, HarperTeen, 9780062563965, 2017

Format: Hardcover

Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 2

Genre:  YA Realism

What did you like about the book? This story follows Linny,  a film-buff girl whose 18-year-old sister ran away from home one night and hasn’t been heard from since; and Sebastian, a geeky physics-obsessed boy whose father ran away from his mother before he was born and hasn’t been heard from since. The two meet at an old folks home where an old local author, who had been missing for 3 years, mysteriously shows up.  The two fall in love while trying to solve the mystery of where this old man spent his 3 years. There are quotes from a physics book before each Sebastian chapter and snippets from a screenplay explaining Grace’s disappearance before each Linny chapter which are most of what keep the story at all enjoyable enough to keep reading.

Anything you didn’t like about it? This book tried to be a cute, diverse, and a quirky YA romance but just fell short on a lot of levels.  Linny’s friends are all very 1-dimensional; perhaps because SHE is very much not concerned with her friends so WE the reader don’t get much at all about them; aside from cringe-worthy moments where Linny’s thoughts compare her friend Rey’s stressful decision to come out as gay as being the same as her being known as the girl with the run-away sister. The pacing and flat characters and the use of Spanish mostly for the simple words (Sebastian speaks fluent Spanish but apparently his stepdad prefers that he use only English so we don’t really get much fluent Spanish from him either and this feels like a hack for the author that had no good reason to be there).  Overall this one was very much a plodding story for me and didn’t give the light-hearted quirky read I had hoped for.

To whom would you recommend this book?  Finding Paris comes to mind though that was more of a road-trip story; this is similar with the  obsession on finding someone and being thrown together due to this search.

Who should buy this book? Public Libraries if you get it as a donation or have a LARGE YA romance readership.

Where would you shelve it? YA Fiction

Should we (librarians/readers) put this on the top of our “to read” piles? No

Reviewer’s Name, Library (or school), City and State: April Duclos, Hudson Public Library, Hudson MA

Date of review: 8/27/17