No More Us for You

by David Hernandez

Overview

For a life to come together, sometimes it first has to fall completely apart.

Isabel is a regular seventeen-year-old girl, still reeling from the pain of her boyfriend's tragic death exactly one year ago.

Carlos is a regular seventeen-year-old guy, loves red licorice and his friends, and works at a fancy art museum for some extra cash.

The two have no connection until they both meet Vanessa, an intriguing new transfer student with a mysterious past. While Vanessa is the link that brings these two very different lives together, will she be the one that can also tear them apart?

In his stunningly beautiful second novel, David Hernandez gives his readers a poetic and profound story that tells of two completely different teenagers and how through everyday life and monumental tragedy lies endless possibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061973611
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/06/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	617 KB
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

David Hernandez is a web designer and a poet whose collections include Always Danger, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, and A House Waiting for Music. He also wrote the novel Suckerpunch. He lives in Long Beach, California, with his wife, the writer Lisa Glatt. No More Us for You is his second novel.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 9 Up–Carlos has a new job at the Long Beach Contemporary, a local art museum. His accounts of hanging with his friends Snake and Will at the bleachers, seeing a bizarre guy who pees on the floor at the museum, his girl tossing him aside for another guy she slept with, and meeting his coworker Vanessa are interspersed with Isabel’s, a girl he doesn’t know, though she goes to his high school. Her chapters begin as she is preoccupied with her boyfriend’s death nearly a year earlier; later, they focus on her friendship with Vanessa, who pulls the two narrators into the same sphere. Aside from having loving parents, Isabel and Carlos seem to have more than their share of disappointment and tragedy when their first date at a Valentine dance ends with friends wrenched from their lives in a dreadful car accident. This slice-of-high-school-life captures reality, though Isabel’s voice doesn’t read quite as true as Carlos’s. Readers will need to stick with the first half to get to a far more rewarding second half. Those who do may be touched by the hope the teens must garner to risk caring for one another in the wake of loss, a hope that Hernandez nicely embodies through skillful narrative structure and evocative language.–Suzanne Gordon, Peachtree Ridge High School, Suwanee, GA

School Library Journal

Carlos is obsessed with red licorice candy; Isabel is haunted by the anniversary of her boyfriend's death. One afternoon the two meet in an art gallery-introduced by Vanessa, a spunky, straight-talking mutual friend-where Carlos works as a security guard. Sparks don't exactly fly, but there's enough curiosity to promise the possibility of romance. The pair's first double date with Vanessa and Carlos's friend Snake, however, ends in tragedy. At its heart, Hernandez's second novel is a peculiar one: It's not exactly a page-turner, but it has enough simple appeal to thrill a broad readership. A complex patchwork of imagery, voices and allusions comes together easily, nearly mirroring one of the collages in the gallery where Carlos works. Death and the fear of it pervade the novel; both Isabel and her parents harbor a near-innate paranoia about their mortality. Meanwhile, hot brushfires scorch the California coast and the novel's backdrop like a smoky, sunny afternoon in Hell. The smart, sophisticated, yet remarkably accessible writing melds everything together with slow-burn effects, and the characters are dead-on (so to speak). A smoldering read. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews

A beautiful, moving novel of tragedy and hope.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Hernandez’s easygoing, unobtrusively skillful prose serves his narrators well, gently transforming them as they make the descision to move from inaction to action, to seize life’s opportunities and each other.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Hernandez’s easygoing, unobtrusively skillful prose serves his narrators well, gently transforming them as they make the descision to move from inaction to action, to seize life’s opportunities and each other.

The Bulletin for the Center for Children's Books