Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Release Date: July 12, 2022
Publisher: Bloomsbury YA
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult / Social Themes
From a NYT bestselling author, a gripping story about a girl who learns she was born of an affair—and moves in with Dad’s “real” family.
High school junior Michaela is close with her single mom. Her dad only pops into her life on holidays; they barely know each other beyond surface obligations.
But then Mom dies suddenly, and Michaela is forced to move in with her dad . . . who reveals he's been married with kids all this time and she was the product of an affair. Before she can even fully grieve, she’s thrust into a strange house with three half-siblings, including Emery, also a junior, who is not thrilled at the prospect of sharing her room (and her life). Michaela needs to let go of everything she’s ever known . . . but will she ever find a home with this family that didn’t ask for her in the first place?
Rachel Vincent pens another gripping and emotional high school saga about the complexities of family, self-identity, and belonging.
Rachel Vincent's No One Is Alone shines the spotlight on 16-year old Michaela Rutherford. Michaela was cruising along, enjoying her life with her single mother (a neonatal nurse), a father that is a pop-up parent who mostly shows up around holidays and birthdays. She's lucky enough that her alleged father was good enough to pay child support so that Michaela and her mother can worry about other things instead of how they are going to pay the bills.
Let's not sweep away the fact that Michaela is the result of a illicit affair between a married man, and her own mother who, no offense, should have known better than to trust the word of a married man. So, after her mother dies unexpectedly and horribly, Michaela's world upends in the worst ways possible. She has to leave all her friends behind, she has to leave her home behind, and everything she and her mother made together now has to be boxed up, sold, or donated.
She learns quickly that not only does she have to go live with her father, Dr. Bosch who already has a family of his own. She now has two brothers (17) Gabriel, (12) Cody, and an older sister by months, Emery who hates the fact that she has to share a room with a girl who is the result of an illicit affair. It's not easy
when she sharing a room with a sister she didn't know she had who
happens to only be a few months older than her. Luckily, Gabe isn't so bad, and how can you not love Cody who is a gamer?
The title of the book is actually from a song by Stephen Sondheim from the musical Into the Woods which is performed towards the end of Act II as the piece's penultimate number. Why does this matter you ask? Because when Michaela arrives at her new school, she sees a poster for a play that her mother loved called Into the Woods. Her favorite song was No One Is Alone. And, with no hopes of getting a call back, Michaela picks up a script and starts singing to her mother who she misses terribly.
I gave Michaela a whole lot of room for anger, and sadness, and lashing out at people because of her mother's untimely and unnecessary death. I wish that she had reached out and asked for help or had time to properly grieve. There is a lot of drama from family dynamics to school that she has to deal with. Not everyone at her school has her best interest at heart and it’s easy to lose ourselves when grief is involved. Michaela also is her own enemy at times. When things get bad, she pulls out the dead mother card. When Emery warns her about a boy, she ignores the warning.
I wasn't expecting a large chunk of this book to be about Into the Woods, especially since Michaela had zero experience in the theater. There are some heart warming scenes between Michaela and the grandmother who has dementia. The whole family tried to distance themselves from the inevitable, while Michaela actually spent time with her and often encouraged others to make time which broke ice with her stepmother.
The family dynamic is interesting, the problems the family faces are real, and each member is well-defined and relatable. I just wish that Michaela had looked some where else instead of the boy her sister broke up with recently.
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