I'm struggling with how to review this because it's won so many awards (and at the risk of sounding like a prude, I do not consider this an appropriate book for the Caldecott age range).

I didn't like it, and I know I wouldn't have liked it as a teenager. None of the characters are likable or compelling. No one grows or changes throughout the story, and nothing happens. It's depressing, and it throws around mature topics as if the authors wanted to seem cool and edgy so they threw everything they could think of into one book where every character has a face shaped like a potato and called it deep.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more stupid and boring leading couple than Lily and Calder. The most interesting character in the whole book is Sophie, the little sister, who barely gets enough page time to make reading this worthwhile. Greenwood Brown has an unforgivable habit of trying to make every character redeemable to the point where the entire book becomes a whiny, navel-gazing diary entry interspersed with Lily's abominable poetry.