Before long, Glory is unable to play anything but the song “Chopsticks.”īut nothing is what it seems, and Glory’s reality is not reality at all. The farther she falls, the deeper she spirals into madness. Brilliant and lonely, Glory is drawn to an artistic new boy, Frank, who moves in next door. As we flash back to the events leading up to her disappearance, we see a girl on the precipice of disaster. Now, as a teenager, Glory has disappeared.

Her single father raised her as a piano prodigy, with a rigid schedule and the goal of playing sold-out shows across the globe.

Library copy.Synopsis: After her mother died, Glory retreated into herself and her music. It’s a quick read in theory, but savvy readers are likely to pour over the pages, looking for hidden clues to help them figure out what happened to Glory.Ĭhopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral. It is fueled by the array of images and the feelings they evoke. The book is neither character-driven nor narrative-driven. There’s a lot of intellectual work to be done by the readers here, and the story raises far more questions than it answers.

Readers will find the images intriguing and the complexity of the underlying story gripping. While the plot is simple, the subtext is not.Įverything that is familiar about the story: a bright girl with a rather controlling father who falls in love with the boy next door gets turned around fairly quickly. The book has very little text and relies on pictures, drawings, and brief conversations between Glory and Frank to tell its story. This is a dark picture book for older teens, and while it’s technically a graphic novel, it’s very different from many other titles which fall into the same format category. When she disappears without a trace, readers will have to use the clues in the book to discern what really happened. Raised as a piano prodigy with little time for recreation or a normal teenage life, Glory has spent much of her formative years traveling around and playing to packed music houses.

Glory has become more and more obsessed with her music since her mother’s death.

Chopsticks book jessica anthony