num_pages: 368
description: In this lyrical heartwrenching story about a forbidden first love a teen seeks the courage to care for another girl despite her small towns bigotry and her fathers violent threats.Growing up in conservative small-town New Mexico fifteen-year-old Mara was never given the choice to be different. Her parentsan abusive close-minded father and a detached alcoholic motherraised Mara to be like all the other girls in Barnaby: God-fearing churchgoing and straight. Mara wants nothing to do with any of it. She feels most at home with her best friend and older brother Iggy but Iggy hasnt been the same since their father beat him and put him in the hospital with a concussion.As Maras mother feeds her denial with bourbon and Iggy struggles with his own demons Mara finds an escape with her classmate Xylia. A San Francisco transplant Xylia is everything Mara dreams of being: free-spirited open wild. The closer Mara and Xylia become the more Mara feels for hereven though their growing relationship is very much forbidden in Barnaby. Just as Mara begins to live a life shes only imagined the girls secret is threatened with exposure and Maras world is thrown into chaos.Mara knows she can't live without Xylia but can she live with an entire town who believes she is an abomination worse than the gravest sin?
language: English
title: Beauty of the Broken
publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers