We are Okay--"A story of betrayal, grief, loneliness, and finally, healing"

Title: We are Okay

Author: Nina LaCour


What it’s about (in 75 words or fewer):  Marin has not spoken to her best friend Mabel or anyone else from home, since Marin's grandfather's sudden death and Marin's departure to college in New York last August.  Now it is winter break, and Marin is staying alone in her dorm room, waiting for Mabel to visit her. Perhaps Mabel can help Marin through the grief and loneliness and someday be okay again.


What I think (in 250 words or fewer):  LaCour mentions in the book's acknowledgements and in this article that she wrote the book while dealing with the loss of her grandfather, and it shows.  Grief and loneliness and isolation just pour from the pages; I don't know how else to describe it.  Even the weather and the present-time setting are isolated--Marin is staying completely alone in her dorm room during a snowstorm in New York and at one point even the electricity goes out.

I have been in many snowstorms in which it is dark outside, the electricity is out, and you are trapped inside while watching the snow come down.  It's quiet and peaceful; the snow muffles the sound. But it also, if you are by yourself on a holiday vacation, sounds incredibly lonely.  This weather is a physical and metaphorical description of Marin's life in We are Okay.

I am finding it difficult to explain what happened to Marin without major spoilers, but let's just say when we do find out what happened the summer before, it is both not as dramatic as I thought it would be and much sadder than I had imagined.  Marin mentions several novels that she compares parts of her life to, such as Jane Eyre, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and A Turn of the Screw, and discusses The Two Fridas, a painting which definitely is easy to compare to Marin's life.

Are all Marin's issues magically resolved?  Nope, but something more important happens:  Marin finally starts to heal.


This book is on the 2018 Rainbow Book List.


My final takeaway (in 75 words or fewer):  I have a hard time reading books about death--see this post for an example. However, there was something about this book; I literally felt my heart pounding in my chest when Marin finally tells Mabel, "I need to tell you what happened after I left" (pg. 157).  I could not put the book down.  We are Okay made me smile, think, and cry, and I recommend that you experience this book, too.


Memorable quotes/passages from the book:

• "'Sister,' Gramps said, his voice low and venomous, 'I lose my wife when she was forty-six.  I lost my daughter when she was twenty-four.  And you remind me to remember them?'" (pg. 32).
• "I wonder if there's a secret current that connects people who have lost something.  Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn't yours anymore" (pg. 68).
• "What I mean is don't be a person who seeks out grief.  There is enough of that in life" (pg. 87).
• "I close my eyes, and I breathe her in, and I think about this home that belongs to neither of us, and I listen to the fire crackling, and I feel the warmth of the room and of her body, and we are okay.  We are okay" (pg. 135).

Other reviews:  Book Page and Book Spoils


This book is available in the Greensboro Public Library.