A Psalm for Lost Girls

Overview

In the small Massachusetts city of New Avon, Tess da Costa is already something like a local legend before she dies — a teenage girl whose apparent miracles have made her, in the eyes of her neighbors, a saint in the making. When she passes away unexpectedly, the town's grief curdles into a campaign: petition Rome, make it official, give New Avon a canonized daughter. Tess's mother welcomes the attention as vindication. Her younger sister Callie experiences it as theft.

Callie is the one person who knew Tess as a sister rather than a symbol, and she watches the myth-making with mounting anger — it flattens a complicated, private person into a plaster statue. That tension sharpens when Ana Langone, a girl who vanished six months earlier, is discovered alive near one of the makeshift shrines built in Tess's honor, seemingly proof of a miracle. For Callie, it's the push she needs to stop mourning quietly and start asking questions.

With Danny, who turns out to have been Tess's secret boyfriend, Callie begins piecing together who her sister actually was, uncovering a private diary and long-buried family history along the way. The investigation eventually intersects with the far darker truth behind Ana's disappearance, pulling Callie's search for her sister's real story into something much more dangerous than she expected.

A Story About Who Gets to Tell a Life

Beneath its mystery-plot mechanics, the novel is preoccupied with the gap between public narrative and private truth — how a community's need for a hero or a saint can overwrite the messier, more human person underneath. Tess's sainthood is presented less as a supernatural question than a social one: a town chooses to believe what serves it, and the people closest to the deceased are left to either go along or push back. Callie's investigation is as much an act of grief and reclamation as it is detective work.

The book also sits in conversation with a wave of YA fiction that borrows the structure of crime and mystery writing — alternating perspectives, a missing-girl case, slow-release revelations — to explore adolescence, faith, and family secrecy rather than crime for its own sake. Its blend of small-town Catholic culture, sisterhood, and a genuine thriller undercurrent gives it a tonal range that reviewers have noted as unusual for a debut, moving between wit, unease, and tenderness within the same chapters.

Why A Psalm for Lost Girls Has Been Challenged

Most objections to the book have centered on its suitability for middle-school-aged readers, with critics arguing that its darker material is better suited to an older teen audience. Chief among the concerns is the novel's handling of Ana Langone's kidnapping, which involves implications of captivity and abuse that some parents and reviewers consider too disturbing for younger readers to encounter without guidance. Additional objections point to Tess's secret romantic relationship with Danny, with some readers uncomfortable with a subplot that pairs teenage romance and physical intimacy alongside the novel's religious themes. A smaller number of challenges have also cited the book's skeptical treatment of institutional religion and sainthood, which some have read as disrespectful of Catholic belief and practice. In total, the book has been formally challenged in 1 state and 1 school district represented in this catalog.