Cures for Heartbreak (review)

It's only twelve days from the time Mia's mother goes into the hospital with a stomachache to her death from liver cancer, leaving fifteen-year-old Mia, her older sister, Alex, and their father reeling. Three months later, the girls' father suffers his second heart attack and goes into the hospital for a bypass, and soon after that Alex goes away to college, leaving Mia struggling with a home suddenly both depleted and overwhelmed by mortality. Though six out of eight of these chapters have been previously published as short stories, they're effectively connected, haunting, vivid snapshots of a puzzled and uncertain survivor trying to learn the ropes. Narrator Mia is believably a sad and angry teenager, whose voice evinces the unwilling wisdom of sad experience: "What no one ever tells you is that people don't die all at once, but again and again in waves, before their deaths and after." Rabb, who draws on her own past in this novel, believably weaves death into the family pattern: Mia's father takes a cancer survivor as his second wife; Mia finds her most meaningful relationship with a teenaged hospital-mate of her father's, a boy she had thought died of leukemia. This is undeniably a book of anguish, it's also one of raw strength and casual, clever humor in random and surprising places, making it a compelling as well as tearful read that's sure to find YA fans.