Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo (review)

When Leigh’s father moves the family away from their beloved ocean home to run a cemetery in the hot California inland, high school freshman Leigh runs the business while her father generally flakes out and her mother retreats to her art studio. Leigh accepts it because she’ll do anything to keep her older sister, Kai, happy, now that Kai is newly in remission from leukemia; Leigh also has begun to believe that death is her own natural element, and that she is responsible for the unexpected death of her best friend, Emily, her anchor during Kai’s illness. Only Dario, the cemetery’s new wonder worker, is able to get past Leigh’s defenses. Leigh improves her Spanish as they dig graves together, relies on him to teach her to drive, and chokes down her crush on him when it turns out that the twenty-something Dario has a fiancée in Mexico hoping to join him in California. A vibrant voice keeps Leigh’s narration from becoming morose, but it also reveals the desperate loneliness and fear of the girl beneath the sass, the girl who believes “everyone good always leaves. Or dies.” Her work at the cemetery is suffused with her frustration toward her parents, but it’s also a perceptive and at times deeply moving view of people in loss, with insider insights like the difference between Pre-Need (those who purchased their plots in advance and are now merely using the service) and At Need (those arriving at the cemetery in fresh grief). Leigh’s an eloquent spokesperson for the pitfalls of being the kid whom worried about in a family in crisis; her raw deal will elicit indignant sympathy, and readers will rejoice at her triumphant reentry into the world. A delightfully robust author’s note describes Longo’s own cemetery experience.