Consider for a moment the Class of 2020: the country churning with anxiety, racism, and uncertainty during your high school years, and then you get walloped by the Covid Pandemic.

Like many of her peers, Wilhelmina Hart is taking a gap year: her father is vulnerable to the Pandemic as he has asthma, while her therapist mother has her hands full with patients. Wilhelmina stays at home to care for her siblings and her trio of beloved aunts -- minus the central member, Aunt Frankie, who has just died of cancer. Meanwhile, her best friends are likewise grappling with the reality of isolation bubbles, mandatory maskings, remote schooling, and the escalating stress of the Trump-Biden presidential contest. Wilhelmina is struggling with depression at the loss of Aunt Frankie, a chronic pain condition, and generalized existential dread at what the future of the country will bring.

This novel, tracking the first week of November, 2020, as well as scenes from Wilhelmina's past, brings that mercifully short period of time back in vivid, painful detail. Things are reaching a breaking point, and Wilhelmina begins having weird visions –– shared, as it turns out, by handsome James Wang. Can she and James make sense of these visions? Is it a message from Aunt Frankie? Can she work through her complicated feelings of jealousy of her two best friends in a bubble without her?

Cashore is one of my favorite YA fantasy novelists, so it was a delight to dive into a thoughtful, imaginative, contemporary story that is -- among other honors! –– sure to make the banned books list for certain pearl-clutching audiences. The aunts are not quite aunts, for instance, but an eccentric, loving, and diverse throuple. Wilhelmina's friends –– one biracial, the other a gay survivor of childhood abuse –– are unapologetically enlightened, politically active, and willing to talk about getting therapy.

Wilhelmina is a strong, bright character who reminds me of a contemporary Meg (A Wrinkle in Time) Murry, fully involved in the moral struggles of her time. The magical realism strikes just the right note in counterpoint to the overwrought reality of that time.

Ultimately both hopeful and heart-warming, this is a novel that captures a tumultuous time with grace, reminding readers that there is joy and light to be found even when things look grim. That there is, after all, a door in this darkness.

Thanks Netgalley and Dutton Books for the e-arc in exchange for my unfettered opinion.

I have loved everything Kristin Cashore has written! This is an amazingly written book about dealing with grief in the time of covid as well as the election in 2020. As someone who has loads of anxiety about if I treat my friends well enough, anxiety with politics, and general just grief and anxiety from my own losses I related with a lot of what the main character has been through. There is also a note from the author that she has/had the same diagnosis/misdiagnosed as the character herself. I'm glad the author is doing amazingly now. I highly recommend this book for anyone with anxiety or grief. It's a fiction novel not meant to teach you directly how to deal with grief but I feel like i learned a lot. Thank you!!!

Put me down as someone who loved this book. Wilhelmina, or should I day Wil-helm-ina?, has loving parents, a younger brother and a younger sister, two best friends, and the love of three "aunts" who all live together in a great summer house in PA. All this, yet she is desperately miserable and burdened by chronic pain. Of course, she also has a pre-vaccination Pandemic to contend with, not to mention the despair of the 2016 election and the fear in that long, long four days in November 2020.

Just the other day, i caught myself thinking, "I'm so glad it's not 2020," but I had forgotten--surpressed--many of the details of that period. How everything was simultaneously claustrophobic and isolating, how deeply I could not understand why 70 million people voted for the orange cretin.

This is also a book about love. Love among friends. Love from a beloved, mentoring, comforting, and instructing triumverate of aunties. And, the first stirring of a mature, adult love.

Very sweet, a little slow but worth reading.