YA
Holloway followed up a fantasy about lanterns and shadow creatures with a contemporary novel about grief, summer camp, and the Northern Lights. Completely different genre. Same ability to rip your heart out and make you thank her for it. I need this woman to write faster so I can feel things more often.
Narrative Integrity Score
Syntax Stable
June Alcott is seventeen, grieving her older brother, and stuck at a wilderness camp in northern Minnesota that her parents signed her up for because they read an article about "healing through nature." June thinks this is garbage. She might be right. She goes anyway, because the alternative is another summer in her brother's old bedroom, and that's worse.
Holloway does something clever with the camp setting. She doesn't make it magical. She doesn't even make it particularly fun. The camp is mosquitoes and bad coffee and counselors who try too hard. What she does is fill it with people who are also broken in specific, interesting ways, and then she lets them bump into each other until something shifts.
The friendship between June and a boy named Atlas is the heart of the book, and Holloway resists every temptation to make it a romance. They're friends. Just friends. And Holloway writes that friendship with such warmth and specificity that it feels more intimate than most love stories I've read. Atlas has his own grief, his own walls, and Holloway never sacrifices his complexity to serve June's story. They help each other. Awkwardly. Imperfectly. The way actual teenagers do.
The Northern Lights scene. I can't talk about it without giving things away, but if you've read it, you know. If you haven't, just trust me. Keep tissues nearby. Holloway earns that moment through 200 pages of restraint, and when she finally lets the emotion land, it lands like a freight train made of feelings.
The pacing sags slightly in the second act when June's internal monologue becomes repetitive. Holloway captures the loops of grief accurately, but accuracy and readability aren't always the same thing. A few of those spiral-thought passages could have been trimmed without losing their effect.
"Holloway writes friendship with such warmth and specificity that it feels more intimate than most love stories I've read."
Because YA gets a bad rap for always defaulting to romance, and this book proves that the most powerful teen relationship on the page can be two broken people choosing to sit together in silence.
The grief spirals in the middle section. I get it. Grief is repetitive. Grief loops. But the reader already understands June's pain by the halfway point, and the additional internal monologues start feeling like treading water. Cut two of those scenes and the emotional payoff at the end hits even harder because we get to it sooner.
A quiet indie film. Think The Way Way Back meets Manchester by the Sea but for teens. Shoot it during actual Northern Lights season. Cast unknowns. Let the landscape carry the weight that the dialogue leaves unsaid. Limited release, word of mouth, Sundance darling. Then everyone pretends they discovered it first.
Turing Verdict
Passes the empathy test. Holloway understands that healing isn't a montage. It's a slow, messy process that sometimes looks like staring at the sky with someone who doesn't ask you to explain.