And We Stay

Overview

And We Stay opens in the immediate shadow of violence: a boy brings a gun into his school library, turns it on the girl he loves, then on himself. Jenny Hubbard's novel does not linger on that moment so much as trace what radiates outward from it, following Emily Beam as she is pulled out of her old life and enrolled at a boarding school far from home.

In Amherst, grief takes strange and specific shape. Emily finds herself drawn to the work and legend of Emily Dickinson, a fellow "Emily" whose reclusive intensity offers an unexpected mirror for her own retreat inward. Two new friends complicate her isolation just enough to keep her tethered to the present, even as she keeps circling back, in poems and in prose, to what she could not stop and cannot undo.

Hubbard alternates verse with narrative prose, letting form itself track the uneven work of recovery. The structure resists a tidy arc of healing; instead it suggests that grief and guilt persist alongside small, real recoveries, rather than being replaced by them.

A Novel in Two Registers

The book's split between verse and prose is not merely stylistic; it enacts the split in Emily herself, between the composed self she presents and the fragmented interior she is struggling to reassemble. Poetry becomes the register for what cannot be said plainly, a choice that aligns the novel with Dickinson's own reputation for compression and indirection.

That alignment places And We Stay within a lineage of young adult fiction that treats literary history as a living resource rather than a museum piece — Dickinson is not invoked as a mere allusion but as a kind of companion figure whose life of withdrawal and intense inner focus speaks directly to Emily's situation. The novel is also part of a broader body of YA writing that emerged in the years following high-profile school shootings, work less interested in the violence itself than in the long, uneven aftermath for those who survive it, especially the ones left to sort out their own complicity, however unearned, in what happened.

Why And We Stay Has Been Challenged

Much of the friction around this novel centers on whether its subject matter is appropriate for the shelves it ends up on, particularly in middle and early high school libraries where readers may encounter it without context or guidance. The concern is less about literary merit than about audience: whether a story this candid about gun violence and suicide should be freely accessible to younger teens.

The objections tend to focus on the opening act of violence itself, along with the novel's unflinching treatment of Emily's guilt, her strained relationship with her parents, and the suicide that sets the plot in motion. Some readers have also pointed to the book's frank handling of grief and sexuality as reasons it warrants restricted access rather than open shelving. Within this catalog, the novel has been the subject of 1 challenge across the tracked states and districts, reflecting a narrower but persistent unease with placing a story this direct about self-harm in the hands of adolescent readers.