Starred Review Althea and Oliver have been neighbors and best friends since age 6. Now 17, their closeness has developed an expectation of which Althea is too aware, while Oliver seems willfully oblivious. Temperamental, unsociable Althea is afraid that she's the one who needs Oliver more, while affable Oliver wishes everything would stay the same. Compounding Althea's insecurity is Oliver's unusual narcoleptic-like condition, which causes him to fall deeply asleep without warning, for weeks or even months, leaving Althea painfully waiting for his return. After an awkward first kiss, an agonizing loss of virginity, and a messy break with Althea, Oliver goes to New York for a medical study. Althea follows, believing it to be her last chance to save their relationship. Though Oliver's condition acts as a plot device 's the catalyst for both characters 's presented with believable sincerity. Set in the 1990s, Moracho's coming-of-age story carries rare insight and a keen understanding of those verging on adulthood: fierce emotions and crippling insecurity mixed with a heady sense of limitless possibility. Or, as Althea puts it to her father while defending her questionable choices, "Sweaty, queasy, weirdly euphoric." Suggest this pitch-perfect debut to readers looking for an older, edgier read-alike to Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park (2013).

Gr 9 Up-This richly satisfying debut defies simple description. On its surface, it is about teenage best friends, a boy and a girl, who have complicated and messy feelings. Friends since they were six, the teens have grown up doors apart, both in single-parent families in Wilmington, North Carolina. What sets this novel apart is the way the youth are allowed to speak for themselves in all their chaotic, exciting complexity. Althea, who has anger issues, is in love with Oliver, which would be complicated enough even if Oliver didn't seem to be a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, falling into a strange, deep sleep at random moments and not waking up for weeks or months. Oliver's mom, Nicky, finds a doctor in her home city of New York who is conducting a study of this disorder, called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, and Oliver grudgingly agrees to participate. While he navigates the strange world of a hospital ward filled with other teenage boys with KLS, Althea tells her dad that she's taking a road trip to visit her mom in New Mexico, but then heads to New York City to find Oliver. Instead, she falls in with a collective house of crusty punks in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, who are perfectly described with deep familiarity instead of exotic detachment. Oliver's medical condition functions as both an interesting narrative quirk and a deeper metaphor, and the resolution is satisfyingly uncertain. The novel is set in the mid-1990s, which is vividly re-created with plenty of drinking, sex, and rock and roll, but it is the exquisitely created and painfully real, pitch-perfect characters who make it so memorable.— Kyle Lukoff, Corlears School, New York City

Prickly teenager Althea's more passive best friend Oliver develops a sleeping disorder. While she desires a romantic relationship with him, Oliver just wants everything to return to normal. This culturally rich novel set in mid-1990s North Carolina and New York City explores the duo's complex coming-of-age--full of bad decisions and secrets--and the undoing of their friendship. An ambitious, noteworthy, well-written debut.

Althea and Oliver have been inseparable best friends since they were six. Now, things are changing. Something is wrong, really wrong, with Oliver, and Althea is starting to realize that she wants more from him than just friendship. As a rare disease finally separates them, will either be able to be who they are without the other?Moracho's debut novel is chock-full of tropes (boy/girl best friends; prep school kids behaving badly; mystery disease that provides convenient plot twists; the romanticized New York City that only exists in fiction and memories; a mid-nineties setting so cell phones will not cripple the plot; absent and/or useless parents), any one of which might have been enough to tank the story. Despite these conventions, the novel works, due in large part to Moracho's engaging and genuine narrative voice. Althea, complex and confused, is the center of the story, a young woman who is not as bad as she thinks she is or tries to be. Oliver, whose disease (the real Kleine-Levin Syndrome) makes him sleep for weeks or months at a time, is, accordingly, absent for chunks of the story and, although he starts out as a fully fleshed-out character, becomes less so as the book progresses. The bittersweet romance, Oliver's battle with his illness, and Althea's coming-of-age struggle should appeal to fans of John Green and Sarah Dessen who are looking for something new.Vikki Terrile.