The Chaos of Standing Still by Jessica Brody (review)

Ryn's best friend, Lottie, was killed in a car accident, and Ryn is trying to get home from winter vacation so that she can mark the anniversary in private. Unfortunately, she's stuck in the Denver airport during a snowstorm. There she meets Xander, a boy her age haunted by his own secrets, but while Ryn wants to hide alone, Xander wants to avoid his own thoughts by hanging with her. Ryn, beset by memories and plagued by Lottie's voice in her head, has the meltdown she fears, only to find Xander well able to push just enough, and pull back just enough, to enable her to begin processing her grief. Lottie was Ryn's person, the energy to her calm, the hot-air balloon to her ballast, but as Ryn revisits the memories of their relationship and meets new people, she begins to understand Lottie and herself in new ways. Xander, for instance, almost accidentally encourages her to see herself as a funny, intelligent, pretty young woman, all adjectives that she thought belonged only to Lottie. Secondary characters occasion additional insight as well as humor; food service workers, an unaccompanied minor prodigy, a volatile couple, a flight attendant, and of course Xander himself provide the means for Ryn to re-examine her past, her present, and what she wants for her future, ultimately helping her to revise Lottie back down to human scale. In fact, the romance takes a back seat to the moving and often funny exploration of an intense friendship and the messiness of all kinds of grief and loss. KC