Jennifer Croft

"Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results."--Publisher.

Homesick

Laura Dobie

The thing is we were both right. All of us are anything, everything, brimming with secrets. Above all we are the shelter we seek out in others and the safe havens we become for those we choose to love. 

Oh Zoe. If being homesick means I miss you, then I guess I always have been. I love you, and I'd love to see you. 

What she wants what she's always wanted - is to capture and to fix forever the presence of her sister, to contain her, to never let her go, or break, or even change. Whatever animal or bird, whatever butterfily or flower, whatever street, whatever car, whatever house has captured her eye, it has only done so insofar as it has featured some component of Zoe- some mood, some Shape, some angle, some quality of glance. There were never really any action shots. And that seamless series Of gestures that Amy performs, cradling the camera in her left hand, is always that same gesture: an attempt at a hermetic, time-repellant embrace.

In country after country she will calculate exchange rates and learn words, lie when she's missing the words for the truth and be lighter in translation because all words without memories are beautiful and hollow like the eggs Amy and Zoe used to dye each Easter that Zoe always tried so hard to keep from breaking.

…people flicker past, their certain steps seeming to keep the flecked and polished floor in place; these gliding silhouettes all intermingle like the languages she hasn't learned or hasn't learned completely yet, which rise and fall in flurries. 

In all of this activity, in all this mystery, in all these intersections, Amy can sense the nearness of the world's quickening pulse, and she can feel her own rising to meet it.

If the next day is a weekday Amy likes to look around the classroom and see who all she saw the night before, and when she sees someone she tries to exchange a glance with them like they are in a fellowship of red plastic cups, and it pleases Amy, too, that now the tables have turned, and it's the adults who aren't in on it: for all their teachers know they stay in studying, when in fact they are all only pretending because actually everyone is hung over, secretly miserable, just like her.

Without Zoe Amy has no idea how she should be when she's with people, and no balance.

…a perfect performance by Yekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov set to Ella Fitzgerald singing a song called The Man I Love. This performance, and this song, will serve Amy for many years as the sole definition of love.The way she awaits him as he skates towards her, the way her face lights up when he gets close. Her immaculate plain beauty. How she can land smoothly on a single blade every time he tosses her into the air no matter how many times she spins around or how fast she is going. 

How many times would they have fallen first to get everything so perfect? Or was it always perfect? They started skating together when he was fourteen and she ten. Did they always know they were in love?

Amy is certain that someday she and Sasha will be Just like that. That if there is a period of initial falling, that that is the period that they are in now. But soon they'll get in sync together, and everything will be perfect.

Amy knows that babies sleep a lot. Their dad says when her sister was born Amy wanted to hold her all the time, but sometimes their mom had to hold her, to feed her, and then Amy would get angry and stomp around and throw tantrums. This makes Amy smile because she knows she ended up with Zoe as hers anyway.

A story of growing up and coming of age told in touching and, at times, heart-wrenching snapshots that are like the pictures Amy takes of Zoe. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read and captures the relationship that sisters share, and love, loss and grief.

Homesick

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