After a car accident seriously injures her best friend and kills her brother's girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Anna tries to cope with her guilt and grief, while learning some truths about her family and herself. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Wrecked E.R. Frank. SimonPulse, $8.99 ISBN 978-0-689-87384-3. A family is torn apart when 16-year-old narrator Anna kills her brother's girlfriend in a car accident, in this story with what PW called "credible, all too human characters." Ages 12-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Gr 8 Up-Anna is driving a very drunk friend home from a party. Moments into the journey, a head-on collision leaves Ellen with a punctured lung and other serious injuries, Anna with a lacerated eye, and the other driver dead. The dead teen happens to be her brother's girlfriend. Anna clearly remembers Cameron's final screams, and she suffers nightmares. Her father is an emotionally repressed tyrant who at first won't allow his daughter to receive counseling. Frank develops and sustains credible characters whose problems are realistic and interconnected. Brief flashbacks allow readers to become acquainted with Jack as he was before Cameron's death and even as he was when he and Anna were children. Their father's brittle personality is not evil or even cruel, but clearly riddled with flaws bred of deeply held fears. In spite of some plot twists that seem convenient rather than realistic, such as the teens' pre-Thanksgiving trip to Florida with Ellen's parents, this story is compulsively readable both because Anna is likable and imperfect and because Frank's writing is so fluid. Rather than being a didactic anti-drinking or pro-counseling story, this is a psychological drama that is definitely worth teens' time.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Gr. 9-12. Returning to the mature voices and situations of Life Is Funny (2000) and America (2002), Frank's fourth novel dissects the suffering of teenage Anna, after she survives a drunk-driving accident that leaves her brother's girlfriend dead. Despite a premise that seems plucked from a problem novel, Frank departs from cliches in her portrayal of Anna as an essentially responsible kid (the other driver was drunk) and in her focus on how tragedy can magnify preexisting conflicts. Other elements receive less-nuanced treatment: Anna's emotionally abusive father's explosions of irrational fury seem caricatured, and subplots dealing with homophobia and alcoholism seem insufficiently developed. Frank may also lose readers in the rambling passages stemming from Anna's guided-visualization therapy. Even so, it's fascinating to observe how a proven author can transform a basically sensational plot, even in limited ways. YAs won't soon forget Anna's moving articulations of panic spreading through her blood, like ink in water, or her inability to banish flashbacks to the late-night drive that ended, horrifically, with screaming, stopped. --Jennifer Mattson Copyright 2005 Booklist From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.