by Jennifer Donnely. Donnelly follows her Printz Honor Book, A Northern Light (2003), with another gripping, sophisticated story, but this time she pairs historical fiction with a wrenching contemporary plotline. After her little brother's murder and her mother's subsequent breakdown, high-school-senior Andi feels like a ghost. She is furious at her father, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist with a 25-year-old pregnant girlfriend, when he arranges for Andi to join him in Paris: Sure. My brother's dead. My mother's insane. Hey, let's have a crepe. In France though, Andi, a passionate musician, discovers a diary written during the French Revolution by a young woman with whom Andi develops an increasing fascination. Donnelly links past and present with distracting contrivances culminating in time travel that work against the novel's great strengths. But the ambitious story, narrated in Andi's grief-soaked, sardonic voice, will wholly capture patient readers with its sharply articulated, raw emotions and insights into science and art; ambition and love; history's ever-present influence; and music's immediate, astonishing power: It gets inside of you . . . and changes the beat of your heart. --Booklist
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