A Year and a Day

Overview

Set in 1975, A Year and a Day follows fifteen-year-old Alice through the small rituals of adolescence: a longed-for first kiss, sleepovers, an audition for a school production of Our Town, the low-grade dread of biology class. On its surface, hers is an ordinary teenage year.

That surface is deceptive. Leslie Pietrzyk builds the novel around a single, shattering fact: Alice's mother, Annette, has driven her car onto a railroad track and waited for the train. There is no note, no warning, no explanation offered to the children left behind. Every scene that follows, however mundane, is colored by that absence.

In the months after, Alice and her older brother go to live with their great-aunt, piecing together a new domestic routine while grief reshapes the old one. Alice, isolated and searching, begins imitating her mother's habits and gestures, as if repetition alone might restore what was lost — until she starts hearing Annette's voice answer her, offering glimpses of a woman who existed apart from her daughter's memory of her.

A Coming-of-Age Story Shadowed by Suicide

Pietrzyk's novel belongs to a body of young-adult fiction that refuses to separate the ordinary business of growing up from the extraordinary weight of grief. Alice's adolescent milestones — auditions, crushes, exams — don't pause for her mourning; they continue alongside it, which is part of the book's quiet argument: loss doesn't interrupt a life so much as it becomes woven into it.

The imagined conversations with her dead mother give the novel a device somewhere between memory and haunting, letting Pietrzyk explore how children construct (and sometimes distort) the parents they've lost. Rather than offering a tidy arc of healing, the book stays close to the disorientation of the first year after a parent's suicide — the way routine, memory, and imagination blur together when a family is forced to reassemble itself without warning or explanation.

Why A Year and a Day Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel center on its unflinching treatment of suicide, including the detailed circumstances of Annette's death and the psychological aftermath for the children she leaves behind. Critics of the book have expressed concern that its portrayal of a parent's suicide, presented without softening for a young-adult audience, could be distressing or harmful to teen readers, particularly those who may be grappling with loss or mental health struggles of their own. The book's frank engagement with grief and its lingering, sometimes unsettling psychological effects has also drawn scrutiny from those who favor more guarded treatments of these subjects in books marketed to teenagers. In this catalog, the novel has been the subject of formal challenge or removal efforts in 1 state and 1 school district.