I absolutely adore the way she handles grief and family and loss and love. ( )

I need to remember what two stars mean here in Goodreads. It means "it was okay"

Which is exactly how I would sum up this book.

See, there was a lot I wanted to like about it. The topic of kids ageing out of foster care and finding a place to call home resonates with me. It is something not really touched on in real life, let alone in the pages of fiction. Nina LaCour is also a Printz award winner and I tend to like authors like that. I loved the setting of the novel, the main character Mila, the young boy, Lee.....

So why the 2 stars?

I just don't do magical realism. Or whatever you want to call elements of the book. I get it, Mila had demons in her past--the life she had escaped from, the verbal and physical abuse she had experienced, the struggle over a choice she had made. But the whole ghost thing? Yeah.....I am still coming to terms with it. Maybe it was the learning to live with the ghosts? Because our past is always a part of us??

That's why the lower rating. Frankly, I think it could have been handled better. =/ Still, I appreciated the storyline. I want to see more foster care storylines! ( )

I’m not sure what I just read. A ghost story? Both figuratively and literally. Living with the ghosts of past traumas, trying to make you way through the trauma and back into the light. I almost thought everyone at the farm was dead. I’m still processing this story. The first 75% I flew through, only to have it stall out here and there. Is she the “someone” watching over her or is it the ghosts on the farm? Need to think about this one a little more… ( )

audio (6 hours) teen/adult fiction.

young adult troubled by memories of her mother's mentally abusive boyfriend, takes a job teaching for a family-run farm full of foster kids. Oh, and the farm is haunted by multiple ghosts.

very lovely, very haunting storytelling with excellent narration. Highly recommended if you want something spooky but not too spooky. ( )

Mila, aging out of the foster system, gets a job at a farm where they help raise and teach other kids in a foster-like condition. With ghosts around. Because why not? Mila's story is of course troubled, being from such a terrible past, grandparents dying, mother abandoning her. But she seems to be a strong young woman who pretty much has her life otherwise and ready to become a well-functioning adult, as soon as she can move past some of those more troubling childhood incidents. She is teacher to Lee, a young boy who is having trouble processing some of his own past, so helping him is also helping her, as she integrates more into the family that the farm is. Reading about the sadness of Mila's childhood kinda breaks your heart, knowing there are plenty of actual children out there with similar and worse stories. But then the ghosts pop up to remind you it's all just a story. The end was rather blah, and I found myself not even really caring what happened to them all. They'll all go on at the farm until they don't, I suppose. ( )