Chasing Brooklyn

Overview

Chasing Brooklyn, written in verse by Lisa Schroeder, follows two teenagers bound together by the same absence. Brooklyn is barely sleeping; a year after her boyfriend Lucca died, her friend Gabe has died too, from an overdose, and his presence now lingers at the edge of her dreams. She doesn't understand what he wants, or why it's his ghost showing up instead of Lucca's.

Across town, Nico copes by moving — running literally and figuratively from the hole his brother Lucca's death left behind. When fragments of Lucca begin appearing to him as well, urging him toward Brooklyn, the pain he's been outrunning catches up with him.

Neither teen is willing, at first, to admit what's happening to them. As the dreams intensify and the messages refuse to stop, Brooklyn and Nico are pushed toward each other, and toward the harder work of grieving out loud rather than alone.

Grief, Memory, and the Shape of Verse

Schroeder's choice of verse form mirrors the fragmented, intrusive quality of mourning itself: short lines and white space leave room for the gaps and silences that dominate Brooklyn's and Nico's interior lives. The novel sits within a body of young-adult verse fiction that treats loss not as a single event to be resolved but as an ongoing negotiation with memory, guilt, and the people left behind.

The ghostly element functions less as fantasy than as metaphor for unfinished mourning — the sense that the dead still have something to say, or that the living haven't yet said everything they needed to. By pairing two characters grieving the same person from different angles, the book also explores how a single death ripples outward unevenly, shaping a romance and a friendship that might not have otherwise formed.

Why Chasing Brooklyn Has Been Challenged

The novel's premise turns on a teenager's fatal overdose and the haunting that follows it, and it is this unflinching proximity to drug-related death that has unsettled some readers. Rather than treating the overdose as a brief plot device, the book lingers on its emotional aftermath — Brooklyn's confusion, her guilt, and the eerie persistence of Gabe's ghost — which some have felt normalizes or dwells too closely on substance use and its consequences for a young audience.

Concerns have also centered on the book's broader emotional weight: a narrative stitched together from two deaths, insomnia, and supernatural visitation, told through the compressed intensity of verse. Readers wary of grief, death, and addiction as central material for teen readers have questioned whether the novel's tone is appropriate for school shelves, even as others point to its handling of mourning as sensitive rather than sensational. According to catalog records, the book has been the subject of 1 challenge tracked across 1 state and 1 school district.