Zarr’s How To Save a Life offers a look at the complexity of creating family

How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) $17.99

In this stunning novel of family, loss and love, Sara Zarr dismantles the clichéd image of adoption in which a birth mother saves a couple from childlessness by placing her baby in their home. Instead Zarr draws readers into adoption’s complexities with a tale of a grieving wife and mother who turns to adoption to soothe her grief over the loss of her husband. The decision sets her grieving teen daughter Jill into a tailspin when the teen birth mother, whose own family and life prove far from pretty, moves into their home.

In this novel, teen Jill MacSweeney, whose father was recently killed in an accident, just wishes everything could go back to normal. Since her dad died, she’s been isolating herself from her boyfriend, her best friends—everyone who wants to support her. And when her mom decides to adopt a baby, it feels like she’s somehow trying to replace a lost family member with a new one.

Enter Mandy Kalinowski who understands what it’s like to grow up unwanted—to be raised by a mother who never intended to have a child. Mandy wants a better life for her baby. But when her life collides with Jill’s she starts to question if she will ever find someone to care for her, too.  Jill and Mandy must learn to both let go and hold on, and that nothing is as easy—or as difficult—as it seems and, in the end, an unlikely but amazing family connection is created.

This is a novel that lets readers in to adoption’s most complex losses and gains while also helping us to rethink just what family might mean.