“It’s just the rest of him took up the whole room
& it was hard to notice he had anything missing at all
except when he was the one missing,
& then it was like days were deflated,
like when his flight rose into the sky
he took all the air on earth with him.”

Put simply, this is an incredible book.

Elizabeth Acevedo writes verse in a way that easily surpasses what I thought was possible, for any kind of novel, verse, prose, YA, adult. Through dual POVs alternating between Camino in the Dominican Republic and Yahaira in NYC, each girl subtly reveals more and more about her respective life, and all that she misses when her father, their father the same man, leaves one for months at a time to travel, unbeknownst to the girls, to his other daughter until he gets ready to leave again. Such a complex life is woven magically through the feelings and observations and heartbreak both Camino and Yahaira pour into their words.

The story begins as Camino is waiting for her father at the airport, in DR, but something's off. He's not there. The plane didn't arrive. It crashed into the ocean. The disaster is major news and there are no known survivors. Separately the girls find ways to mourn the new reality that doesn't include their father. Time moves forward, marked on the page by how many days have passed since the plane crash.

Yahaira has to live with the guilt she feels for her cold behavior towards her father for the better part of a year and a mother who is taking the loss of her husband particularly hard. Camino, still living with her aunt, laments the future she'd been hoping for, at college in New York, finally being near to her father year-round. The question is not simply if they can move on without him, but what they will do when they found out about the other. Acevedo implemented an achingly sad plot onto a wonderful study of identity and family what it means if your history (or Camino's and Yahaira's) strays from what has generally been accepted as the norm. So lovely.

“Can you be from a place
you have never been?

You can find the island stamped all over me,
but what would the island find if I was there?

Can you claim a home that does not know you,
much less claim you as its own?”