by Jasmine Warga
Balzer & Bray/Harperteen
5/3/2022, paperback
SKU: 9780062956682
An extraordinary new novel from Jasmine Warga, Newbery Honor-winning author of Other Words for Home, about loss and healing--and how friendship can be magical.
Cora hasn't spoken to her best friend, Quinn, in a year.
Despite living next door to each other, they exist in separate worlds of grief. Cora is still grappling with the death of her beloved sister in a school shooting, and Quinn is carrying the guilt of what her brother did.
On the day of Cora's twelfth birthday, Quinn leaves a box on her doorstep with a note. She has decided that the only way to fix things is to go back in time to the moment before her brother changed all their lives forever--and stop him.
In spite of herself, Cora wants to believe. And so the two former friends begin working together to open a wormhole in the fabric of the universe. But as they attempt to unravel the mysteries of time travel to save their siblings, they learn that the magic of their friendship may actually be the key to saving themselves.
The Shape of Thunder is a deeply moving story, told with exceptional grace, about friendship and loss--and how believing in impossible things can help us heal.
Target age: 8 to 12
Reviews:
"With taut pacing, nuanced characters, and compassionate depictions of grief and trauma, Warga's novel is both timely and transcendent; a must-purchase for all collections." -- School Library Journal
"The story builds steadily toward a moving conclusion; Warga's lyrical language and credible rendering of both middle school life and of the tensions of two families coping differently with personal devastation make for a perceptive, sensitively told novel about the effects of gun violence." -- Publishers Weekly
"[Cora and Quinn] are well developed, and Warga skillfully handles both their delicate, emotional friendship and larger subjects of grief and gun violence. Powerful and emotionally complex." -- Kirkus Reviews
About the Author:
Jasmine Warga's debut middle grade book, Other Words for Home, is a Newbery Honor Book. She is the author of the novels for teens My Heart and Other Black Holes, which has been translated into over twenty languages, and Here We Are Now. She lives and writes in Cincinnati, Ohio.