You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith

From the Publisher

Emma Healy has never fit in with the rest of her family. She's grown used to being the only ordinary one among her rather extraordinary parents and siblings. But when she finds a birth certificate for a twin brother she never knew she had, along with a death certificate dated just two days later, she feels like a part of her has been justified in never feeling quite whole. Suddenly it seems important to visit his grave, to set off in search of her missing half. When her next-door neighbor Peter Finnegan — who has a quiet affinity for maps and a desperate wish to escape their small town — ends up coming along for the ride, Emma thinks they can't possibly have anything in common. But as they head from upstate New York toward North Carolina, driving a beat-up and technically stolen car and picking up a stray dog along the way, they find themselves learning more and more about each other. Neither is exactly sure what they're looking for, but with each passing mile, each new day of this journey, they seem to be getting much closer to finding it.

School Library Journal

Gr 7–10—This book has as rocky a start as the road trip it describes. Emma, 16, feels disconnected from her family of academics and brilliant people. Rather than compete for attention, she's happier being alone. Then she discovers a reason for her feeling of isolation. She had a twin brother who died two days after they were born. Emma, determined to find out more, sets off on a road trip from New York State to North Carolina to see her brother's grave. When her car breaks down in New Jersey, she calls her neighbor Peter, who arrives in a stolen yellow convertible. Along the way, Emma adopts a stray dog, makes peace with her family, and learns that there's more to Peter than his interest in maps and the Civil War. Told in alternating chapters by Emma and Peter, the plot moves jerkily from the present to the past, then back to the present. After an uneven beginning, however, the novel becomes more engaging as Emma seeks answers to why she was never told about her brother.—Melissa Rabey, Frederick County Public Libraries, Frederick, MD

Kirkus Reviews

Two 16-year-old loners plus a dog take a road trip that brings them together; it's a familiar plot, but Smith invests her somewhat odd and isolated characters with some distinctions that help to make this feel more fresh than that description might lead readers to believe. Emma is a much-younger child in a family of academically gifted children and parents, while Peter's father is the town sheriff in the upstate New York college town where they live and occasionally share space at the same time. As acquaintances recognizing a bond of sorts, they gradually begin to open up to each other. Peter's mother died at his birth, and Emma has just discovered a birth and death certificate minutes apart for a twin brother never before known. An alternating focus on each establishes the differences that have nonetheless managed to lead them to share a similar journey. Still, it's a half-relayed journey at best, one that fails to deal realistically with money, potty breaks or other mundane details of life on the road-a lapse that might well prove fatal with readers. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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