The Unpassing

n the day before the Challenger is set to launch, ten-year-old Gavin, the narrator of Chia-Chia Lin’s stunning debut, , falls ill and drifts out of consciousness. When he wakes up, a week has passed, the Challenger has exploded, and his sister Ruby has died from the very illness he just survived. Gavin, who once believed that “things that had been splintered could be intact again,” wakes up to a spl intered world. The novel is set in Alaska, a fitting frontier for this book about a family of Taiwanese immigrants who are staking their claim on a new country, grappling with grief, and trying