We Are All So Good at Smiling

Whimsy is sixteen and hospitalized again, this time for clinical depression, when she meets Faerry. He carries fae blood and a grief he cannot name. When his family moves onto her street, Marsh Creek Lane, the two start comparing scars. Their lives crossed once before, eleven years earlier, in ways neither of them can explain.

At the end of the lane stands a forest they have both feared for as long as they can remember. It whispers to Whimsy from her hospital bed. Faerry believes it holds the piece of himself he lost. Reaching it means facing figures pulled from West African and Slavic folklore: Anansi, Baba Yaga, Snow White. Each one seems to guard a piece of what happened to them.

Written in verse, the novel moves in short, image-heavy lines. Grief and magic sit side by side here rather than trading places. Both Whimsy and Faerry are Black teenagers, and the author draws on her own experience of depression to write mental illness without flinching. Self-harm, suicidal ideation, generational trauma and racism all surface along the way.

A glossary of the fairy tales woven through the story closes it out. This is a young adult verse novel for readers who want their fantasy grounded in something true: two teenagers learning to carry what happened to them instead of running from it.