When Reason Breaks

At Surrey High School, two sophomore girls are quietly coming apart. Elizabeth Davis is angry and rebellious, drawn to a nearby cemetery and to dark imagery that lands her in trouble at school. Emily Delgado looks like the picture-perfect daughter of a rising local politician, but the pressure to be flawless is slowly crushing her, and she hides her despair from everyone. When their English class begins studying Emily Dickinson, the two are thrown together on a project, and the reclusive poet's verses become a mirror for their private struggles with depression. Told in alternating perspectives and threaded with letters to an unnamed teacher, the novel builds toward a suicide attempt, withholding until late which girl it will be. Rodriguez writes with honesty about mental illness, identity, family expectation, and the fragile, forming friendship between two very different teenagers. Grounded in Dickinson's poetry and a Latina protagonist's voice, it is an unflinching contemporary young-adult story about the weight young people carry and the question of whether connection can arrive in time.