In giving voice to memorable teenager Loa Lindgren, Blythe Woolston offers us a penetrating look into the heart of a wounded but marvelously unique soul working her way through the pain of losing loved ones to death, overcoming nightmares in which death (The Bony Guy) haunts and menaces her, coping with seemingly merciless parents, loving a little brother, retrieving her own hope, and making us care as she does.

This voice is not a common one. Loa, assigned to explain “The Freak Observer” by her Physics teacher, laces her experiences together with dreams and physics questions as she works her way through them. Compounded by confusion about Corey, her friend/lover, and his enigmatic, seemingly threatening postcards from Europe, Loa’s life appears bleak and unpromising.

Then change happens just when it should, and it is not, thank the stars, all up to her anymore. As her understanding shifts, there is starlight where before there was a universe of regret, and, as so often in life, new friends and art pave the way for hope, self-love, and fulfillment.

“The Freak Observer” is a conscious entity that pops into being in its own universe because there may be other universes to observe. So, in a sweet dream that comes at last, Loa finds she is able to breathe underwater in a world astonishingly beautiful and new, realizing “this is only another universe. And I’m its observer.”

Well-written and absorbing, this book is a fine path through the brain of a tender young person well on her way. Highly recommended.