Publishers WeeklyAs engrossing as Oates's Sexy, this psychological drama explores how a teen is changed by a devastating automobile accident that leaves her mother dead. Fifteen-year-old Jenna is sitting in the passenger seat when the car her mother is driving careens into the guardrail of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Details of the wreck remain fuzzy to Jenna, but she feels that she may have been responsible for the crash. After her physical injuries heal, her emotional wounds are still raw as she adjusts to a different life, leaving her home in Tarrytown, N.Y., moving to a small New Hampshire town to live with her aunt and uncle and their two younger children. She begins to think of her life in terms of before the wreck and after the wreck, and longs to be "in the blue," the idyllic drug-induced state she experienced in the hospital.
