Teenage Sky lives with her dad and younger brother, Gully, near the used record store that is her dad’s passion but barely keeps the family afloat financially. Sky’s dad, while loving, is in a constant state of stress he relieves by drinking. Sky is often responsible for Gully, who is smart but socially shunned for his challenging, sometimes unusual behavior. Gully thinks of himself as a detective and is determined to find the white jeep seen the night several businesses — including the record store — were the victims of vandalism. Meanwhile, Sky is obsessed with teenager Mia Casey, who drowned in the river a year ago. It wasn’t necessarily a suspicious death, but Sky can’t stop wondering about what happened to Mia, especially after Mia’s older brother, Luke, starts working at the record store. Mia, she begins to realize, moved in the same crowds as her older friend Nancy, who lives life even more on the edge than Sky realizes. Nancy — Sky’s only friend — has helped Sky feel more mature and better about herself, but the surprise of Sky’s feelings for Luke, reciprocated, and her new, unexpected connection with a girl from school help lessen the pain of Nancy’s increasing unreliability. As the mysteries intertwine and unravel, Simmone Howell shows the ways life can be funny and warm and tense and tragic. Her superbly realized characters, including Sky’s terrific family — so flawed and yet loving and trying — live in a neighborhood with rough edges and a mix of hearts and intentions. Howell’s descriptions are at times astonishing for their freshness. (Age 14 and older)

In the tradition of High Fidelity and Empire Records, this is the literary soundtrack to Skylark Martin’s strange, mysterious, and extraordinary summer.

This is the story of a wild girl and a ghost girl; a boy who knew nothing and a boy who thought he knew everything.

It’s a story about Skylark Martin, who lives with her father and brother in a vintage record shop and is trying to find her place in the world. It’s about ten-year-old Super Agent Gully and his case of a lifetime. And about beautiful, reckless, sharp-as-knives Nancy. It’s about tragi-hot Luke, and just-plain-tragic Mia Casey. It’s about the dark underbelly of a curious Australian neighborhood. It’s about summer, and weirdness, and mystery, and music.

And it’s about life and death and grief and romance. All the good stuff.