And We Stay
And We Stay
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Random House
Annotation: After her high school boyfriend threatens her with a gun and then kills himself in the school library, Emily Beam is shipped off to a Massachusetts boarding school, where she encounters a ghostly presence that shares her name.
 
Reviews: 7
Catalog Number: #5687250
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House
Copyright Date: 2015
Edition Date: 2015 Release Date: 05/12/15
Pages: 224 pages
ISBN: 0-385-74058-1
ISBN 13: 978-0-385-74058-6
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2013002236
Dimensions: 22 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Starred Review ALA Booklist (Fri Nov 01 00:00:00 CDT 2013)

Starred Review Like Paper Covers Rock (2011), Hubbard's sophomore novel has a boarding-school setting and a main character who writes poetry and draws inspiration from a famous writer. And also like Paper Covers Rock, this novel is accomplished, polished, and mixes prose and poetry to stunning effect. After Emily Beam discovers that she is pregnant and breaks up with her boyfriend, he walks into the school library, threatens Emily, and then shoots himself. After an abortion, Emily is sent away to the Amherst School for Girls, in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is located in the hometown of Emily's idol, Emily Dickinson. The spirit of Dickinson is everywhere en her voice echoes in Emily's head d as Emily immerses herself in Dickinson's 1,775 poems, she writes her anguish into poems of her own, which flood her brain constantly. Emily's path to healing involves moving back and forth in time, to memories of Paul, and sharing her poems with empathetic roommate, K. T. The third-person, present-tense voice is compelling. Sounding almost like stage directions ("Emily Beam is sighing all the time"), Hubbard's narrative tone will only make readers want to lean in closer. The poems themselves are insightful and poignant, illuminating the dark corners of Emily's psyche. And though Emily may be damaged and the winter of 1994 is long, happier times d spring em on the horizon.

School Library Journal Starred Review (Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 CST 2014)

Gr 9 Up-Emily Beam is a new student at Amherst School for Girls. There are rumors, of course, about why she has entered the school in January of her junior year, but none of them come close to reality. The truth remains only for Emily to replay over and over, each time revealing a bit more about the circumstances leading up to the day when her boyfriend entered the school library where she was working with her class, lured her into the stacks to talk, and then shot himself in the head. (By the way, If you're wondering why no one simply Googled Emily's mysterious past, her story is set in 1995, perhaps for that very reason.) As the teen acclimates to boarding-school life, she keeps her story close to her chest, but reveals herself little by little through the poems she writes and ultimately shares. Emily feels an affinity for her namesake, Emily Dickinson, who lived and wrote just down the street from ASG, and draws on her spirit to pour her emotions onto paper. And We Stay is a little gem of a book. Readers learn as much about Dickinson's beliefs and poetry as they do about friendship, first love, teen suicide, and even abortion-not an easy balancing act. Yet despite the heavy topics, the book feels sweet and poetic and never gratuitous. Budding poets may particularly appreciate Emily's story, but there is certainly something for anyone looking for a good read with a strong, believable female lead who is working her hardest to overcome tragedy.— Jill Heritage Maza, Montclair Kimberley Academy, Montclair, NJ

Horn Book

After her ex-boyfriend's suicide, sixteen-year-old Emily Beam is sent to an Amherst, Massachusetts, boarding school to start anew and heal. And through a friendship with her sympathetic roommate, connecting with local legend Emily Dickinson's work, and blossoming as a poet herself, she starts to. Hubbard thrives in both prose and verse storytelling: interspersed within emotionally astute third-person-omniscient narration are Emily's moving poems.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Seventeen-year-old Emily Beam transfers to the Amherst School for Girls in the middle of her junior year carrying two secrets: her boyfriend Paul committed suicide after she broke up with him, and their breakup was motivated by her pregnancy and her parents- pressure on her to have an abortion. Grieving and guilty, Emily discovers writing poetry to express her feelings, and Hubbard forms the novel with the same blend of prose and verse she used in her critically acclaimed debut, Paper Covers Rock. Less successfully, Hubbard forces a connection between Emily and Amherst-s most famous poet, Emily Dickinson, that never quite lives up to the younger Emily-s claim that - brain has been hijacked,- despite her composing some charming Dickinson-style poetry. Hubbard-s writing is elegant and emotional in both styles, and the revelation of Emily-s history carries the first half of the book, though the plot falters when there is little of the past left to discover. Mature readers who enjoy a bit of melancholy and might spark to Dickinson will be in good company on Emily-s journey. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jonathan Lyons, Lyons Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewing Agencies: - Find Other Reviewed Titles
Starred Review ALA Booklist (Fri Nov 01 00:00:00 CDT 2013)
School Library Journal Starred Review (Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 CST 2014)
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
Horn Book
Michael Printz Honor
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
Wilson's High School Catalog
Word Count: 47,753
Reading Level: 5.1
Interest Level: 9-12
Accelerated Reader: reading level: 5.1 / points: 7.0 / quiz: 165235 / grade: Upper Grades
Reading Counts!: reading level:7.3 / points:12.0 / quiz:Q63350
Lexile: HL810L
Guided Reading Level: I
There are rumors the day Emily Beam arrives at the Amherst School for Girls--in January, halfway through her junior year. She doesn't look like the other girls, who look like girls in magazines. She doesn't sound like them, either, and she wears different shoes. As she sits on a bed she's never slept in, in the first room she's ever shared, Emily announces to the tall, curly-haired blonde standing by the window that she's come from Boston. This isn't a lie. It is where she's stayed for the past month.
K.T. nods and looks down at Emily's feet. "What size shoe do you wear?"
"Seven," Emily says.
K.T. walks over to her closet and digs out a pair of navy-blue clogs with wooden heels.
"Here," says K.T. "Wear these."
Emily takes off her rubber-soled Mary Janes.
"They'll be a size too big," K.T. says, "which will make it tough to walk on those little pebbles out there, but at least no one will talk shit about you."
As Emily slips on the clogs, K.T. takes the black Mary Janes and drops them--clunk, clunk--into the steel trash can.
"You can wear your pj's to class if you want," K.T. says. "A lot of us do."
Emily takes in her roommate's casual elegance: the untucked white button-down, the purple cashmere cardigan, the necklace of tiny turquoise beads, the brown suede boots with scuffed toes. Emily looks down at her new giant feet. "I have to go to the bathroom," she says.
"Do you remember where it is?" K.T. points. "Just at the end of the hall."
In the bathroom, Emily sweeps her long hair up into a messy ponytail, which is the style here, she's noticed. In the morning--her first day of class--she'll wear the Harvard sweatshirt she got in Boston. As far as boarding schools go, Emily has no idea how Amherst School for Girls ("ASG," K.T. calls it--like ask but with a g) compares. Boarding school? It wasn't even in the realm of possibilities; it wasn't even on the radar screen. And by the time Aunt Cindy convinced Emily's parents that it was necessary, ASG was the only school that would take her, and that was only because there was an extra bed since K.T.'s prior roommate, Hannah, had been expelled for sneaking out late at night to meet townies.
"You're a Hart Girl now," K.T. tells Emily on their way to dinner.
"A heart girl?"
"Yeah," says K.T. "As in Hart Hall, where we live."
"Oh, right," says Emily. The dorm doesn't look like dorms she's seen in pictures or movies. It's a house, a sprawling Victorian one, painted gray with purple trim, tucked behind a high row of boxwoods.
"ASG was the wrong place for Hannah to begin with. This place is about the mind, and Hannah, well, she was all about the body."
Townies. Dorms known as halls. Cafeterias called dining rooms. To survive here, Emily is going to have to learn a whole other language.
Maybe that's why the poem comes sweeping in that very first night at ASG. In the past, Emily Beam has written poems only when a teacher has required her to, but as soon as she lies down on her single bed under the slope of the old wooden roof, lines unspool like ribbons, and she can't fall asleep until she ties them into bows.
MAZE
At the start, she stands: an opening
between the high, chopped-off
hedges. She can walk, one
foot, then another,
over the little pebbles.
It all looks so English,
so civilized, until
the dead end.
The dead end. The dead
end. The wind lends
the hedge its own green
voice. But what human speaks
Hedge? What antiquated
map shows a girl
the way?
No exit sign in neon
points her out.
No bread crumbs
on a path. If only
she were a pencil
with an eraser, she
could draw herself
out.
Emily Beam, January 15, 1995

Emily looks over at K.T., who, before she fell asleep, put on earphones and listened to classical music that was so loud that Emily could hear it across the room. Emily should be sleeping, too. It is five o'clock in the morning, and in three hours, after a special assembly celebrating the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., she'll stand face to face with her first day of classes. If Emily had to tell somebody what happened in the Grenfell County High School library, where would she begin? How desperate did Paul have to be to do what he did? Emily will never understand it, never. Didn't he realize that when he pulled the trigger, the world would go on without him in it? Didn't he know that dead, he'd be nowhere?
Emily puts her head down on her desk, on top of the poem she has written, and closes her eyes. As she has done for thirty-four nights, she tries to read past the dark. Read into Paul. There was little crime in Grenfell County with its spread-out landscape. The most violent thing ever to happen in the history of Grenfell County had happened at the high school.
The high school to which she will never return. The day after she and her parents arrived in Boston, Aunt Cindy quietly suggested over chicken potpie that they find Emily a boarding school, maybe even one in Massachusetts, where she could finish out her junior year. Emily's parents agreed. It was not a good idea for Emily to have to go back home and deal with the whispers and stares and, of course, the memories.
Emily was stunned. It was straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Boarding school? Only orphans and screwups and spoiled rich girls went to boarding school. She would be despised there, made fun of. She would become the butt of every joke ever told. So Emily pitched a fit, which had no effect. She jumped around the dining room and kicked the couch in the den and slung all of the magazines on Aunt Cindy's coffee table across the room. She told her aunt and her parents that they were evil. When she told them she hated them, they stared back at her, stone-faced.
For a month Emily stayed with Aunt Cindy, who oversaw Emily's recovery by renting movies on a theme. The first trip to Blockbuster, they rented films set in Paris--Emily's choice. The next time, Aunt Cindy chose films about high school.
"You haven't lived until you've seen The Breakfast Club," Aunt Cindy said. The movie was about five high-school types who don't know each other very well and get stuck together in Saturday detention in their library.
Emily shook her head. "Is it really a good idea for me to watch something that takes place in a school library?"
"Emily," said Aunt Cindy, "you're seventeen years old. I think you're smart enough by now to separate fact from fiction."
That's the thing, though; Emily isn't so sure. A story gets told one too many times and facts melt away like pats of butter. Case in point: not even forty-eight hours after Paul died, people in Grenfell County were saying that he had tried to use Mr. Jim, the one-armed janitor, as target practice when the truth was that the two of them had simply passed each other in the hall as Paul made his way to the library.
Another case in point: a new girl shows up at the Amherst School for Girls after the holiday break, and rumor has it that this new girl got into major trouble at her old school. Why else would she materialize midway through her junior year at a place where she has no friends, no connections, no legacy? Emily and Aunt Cindy sat on the couch biding time until Christmas was past and the new year was under way, eating popcorn and watching stupid high school movies about nerds who prevail or virgins who succumb.
Before Boston, before ASG, Emily had wanted nothing more than to be loved by a boy. When she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, she had watched girls on the cheerleading squad sprout wings with each boyfriend. They became more beautiful, the beauty of confidence. For four months, Emily had it, too.
But here at ASG, she is surrounded by girls more self-assured than she, clean-looking girls who sleep next to photographs of their boyfriends and talk to them daily on the phone in the hall. Boys are kept at a safe distance. The girl who gave Emily and her parents the campus tour was quick to point out that there are dances nearly every weekend with boys' schools in the area, but Emily wants nothing to do with boys or dances. She wants nothing to do with poems, either, but in the long shadow of death, they creep in.

When K.T.'s alarm goes off at six-thirty, Emily is already up and dressed in her Harvard sweatshirt, a pair of Levi's jeans ("unfailingly safe," K.T. told her), and her one thick pair of socks. The clogs wait by the door as she sits at her desk, doodling.
K.T. rolls over. "Hey, look at you! Let me throw on some clothes. You've inspired me not to wear my pj's."
When Emily came down the stairs wearing white on the day of Paul's funeral, her mother told her to go back upstairs and put on black wool pants. Emily told her to go to hell. In the church, she sat hunched between her parents. Enduring the funeral was like wading through a dark-gray fog, the disembodied voice of Reverend Wright cutting its way through:
"Though his time with us was short, Paul Wagoner followed in the footsteps of Christ. . . . We will never know why Paul did what he did. . . . With God's help, and each other's, we will come to accept the not knowing. . . ."
Paul.
Paul.
Pall.
On December 12, as the sirens drew closer to the high school, the students were told over the intercom to stay in their classrooms or to get to one. Theories were generated: Mr. Dees, the band director, had a heart attack; Mrs. Ziegler, the ninth-grade geometry teacher, collapsed on top of the overhead projector after solving an especially difficult proof. No one mentioned Paul Wagoner. No one. Paul was on the football team. He didn't spend hours in front of the TV. He laughed out loud at his friends' jokes, even the corny ones. He drank milk at lunch. He didn't scowl or dress all in black. He was on the way to being handsome, a country boy who hadn't fully grown into his looks. He wasn't the most popular boy in the senior class, but he wasn't the least popular, either. He lived somewhere in the middle, like most teenagers. Practically everyone in Grenfell County went to the funeral. Paul's teachers and Mr. Burton, the principal, sat in the front pews off to the side. The Wagoners sat front and center: Paul's mother and father, some other adults Emily didn't know, probably aunts and uncles. Carey, Paul's little sister, squeezed in beside their grandmother Gigi. It was Gigi's gun that had done the job. Paul had stolen it on a Sunday morning when everyone else in his family was at church.
How weird Paul must have felt to sneak into his grandmother's bedroom and open her bedside table; how sad for him to take what was meant to be an anchor in a sea of loss after the death of Paul's grandfather. In the long parade out of church, Emily tried to smile at Gigi, but Gigi wasn't looking at anything--her eyes were closed. Standing at the back of the church was Mr. Jim, the school janitor. Emily had been thinking of him only hours before as she'd stood at her closet, wondering how he got dressed. Mr. Jim had only one arm--his right--and Emily decided she would try getting dressed without using her left one. The bra was impossible, so she flipped it back into the top drawer. The black wool pants had three buttons, but the white dress had a zipper, so on it went. The shoes Emily had wanted to wear, her Mary Janes, had straps, so the black rain boots would have to do.
Emily bent down, the fingers of her right hand stretching into the dark like tentacles. Those boots were in the back of the closet somewhere. She hummed snippets of made-up songs. (These boots were made for walkin' to where a boyfriend lies in a coffin.) Once she found the boots, she placed them on the floor at the end of her bed, the rubber holes gaping. She was going to stand on her bed and jump into them feetfirst, but what if she fell and broke her ankle? Her parents would have to drive her to the hospital, and then they'd all miss the funeral. Emily left the boots where they were and rolled herself back on the bed until it was time to go, when she would manage the boots with one hand.
Paul had told her that when he died, he wanted to be cremated. (Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all our lives gone to rust.) She wanted to forget that Paul had ever told her anything. She wanted to crawl under the bed, fall through the floor, and forget all the facts.
Paul.
Pall.
In the dim light of the desk lamp, while K.T. is down the hall in the bathroom, Emily opens her dictionary and looks up the word: pall.
1. a cloth, often velvet, for spreading over a coffin, bier, or tomb.
2. a coffin.
3. anything that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, especially with darkness or gloom.
Pall, then, as in pallbearers. Eight members of the football team--Paul's friends, and Emily's, too. She doesn't want friends at ASG because then she'd have to lie to them. It's bad enough lying just to K.T., but what other way is there? Mazes grow ever higher when lies beget lies.
K.T. pokes her head in the room and motions. Emily slings her book bag over her shoulder and follows her roommate to the dining room, which is bright and noisy.
"I'm going to show you how to work this system," K.T. says. "Grab a tray. Now, I like my eggs poached, but only Hilly will make them that way, and you have to ask her nicely when the boss man isn't around."
"That's okay," says Emily. "I like my eggs scrambled."
"IdonotlikegreeneggsandhamIdonotlikethemSamIAm," K.T. says. "Oh, and by the way, they put dreams in the coffee." She reaches for a cup and saucer. "That's why it's so good."
"Cream?"
"Dreams." K.T. smiles. "Good stuff."
"They put dreams in the coffee."
"If I'm lying, I'm dying," says K.T., her brown eyes deep and smiling. "I started drinking it last November, and ever since then, I sleep like a baby, ironically enough. I snore, by the way."

Excerpted from And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner in the vein of This is Where It Ends

“A gentle, lyrical story of incomprehensible sorrow faced with quiet courage.”—ELIZABETH WEIN, New York Times bestselling author

“Hubbard treats tragedy and new beginnings with a skilled, delicate hand.”—JOHN COREY WHALEY, author of Where Things Come Back, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award


Senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school with a stolen gun, threatens his girlfriend, Emily Beam, and then takes his own life. Soon after, angry and guilt-ridden Emily is sent to a boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where two quirky fellow students and the spirit of Emily Dickinson offer helping hands. But it is up to Emily Beam to heal her own damaged self, to find the good behind the bad, hope inside the despair, and springtime under the snow.

Boston Globe Best YA Novel of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year 
A Tayshas High School Reading List Selection
A North Carolina Young Adult book Award Nominee

* "
As graceful as a feather drifting down, this lyrical story delivers a deep journey of healing on a tragic theme.”—Kirkus ReviewsStarred

"And We Stay is a little gem of a book. . . . there is certainly something for anyone looking for a good read with a strong, believable female lead who is working her hardest to overcome tragedy.”—School Library JournalStarred

“Hubbard’s writing is elegant and emotional.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“This novel is accomplished, polished, and mixes prose and poetry to stunning effect.”—Booklist

“Hubbard . . . captures perfectly the turbulence of young love, the bonds of friendship, and the push-and-pull dynamic between teens and adults.”—VOYA


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