Everything Grows

Overview

Aimee Herman's novel follows Eleanor Fromme, a fifteen-year-old who shaves her head after learning that James, a boy who once tormented her, has died by suicide. An English class assignment asking students to write to someone who will never read the letter becomes Eleanor's way of processing what she feels and what she doesn't yet have words for.

As the letters accumulate, Eleanor's attention turns inward. She begins to notice a persistent gap between how her body is read by others and how she experiences herself, and that noticing becomes its own quiet plot alongside the mystery of James's death. Around her, a mother's mental illness, shifting friendships, and a soundtrack of early-1990s grunge and riot grrrl music form the texture of her world.

The novel moves toward reconciliation rather than resolution: Eleanor rebuilds fractured relationships, assembles a support network from unlikely people, and edges closer to language for her queer identity, without the story tying every thread into a neat conclusion.

A Coming-of-Age Story Told Through Grief and Sound

Herman situates Eleanor's search for identity inside a specific cultural moment, using the era's underground music scene as more than backdrop — it functions as a vocabulary of defiance and belonging that Eleanor borrows before she has words of her own. The epistolary device of writing to someone who cannot answer gives the book its structural tension: Eleanor is composing herself in the act of trying to address James, and the letters reveal as much about her uncertainty as about her grief.

The novel also treats mental illness and suicide as ongoing, lived realities rather than plot devices resolved by a single revelation, echoing how grief and self-discovery in adolescence rarely arrive in isolation from family strain. In the broader landscape of young adult fiction, the book has been positioned within a wave of novels exploring gender identity through interior, voice-driven narration rather than issue-driven exposition, and it has drawn recognition within LGBTQ-focused literary circles for that approach.

Why Everything Grows Has Been Challenged

Reviewers have pointed to the authenticity of Eleanor's voice and the sensitivity with which the novel handles grief as its strongest qualities, yet those same close-in, unfiltered depictions are what have drawn scrutiny from challengers. Objections have centered on the book's frank treatment of gender identity and sexuality, including Eleanor's exploration of her body and attraction, which some reviewers of school library holdings have judged too explicit or too mature for the intended age group.

The novel's unflinching handling of suicide has also been a point of concern, with some challengers worried that detailed depictions of a peer's death and its aftermath could be distressing or unsuitable for younger readers, regardless of the book's evident intent to portray grief responsibly. Additional discomfort has centered on the portrayal of a parent's mental illness and the destabilizing effect this element has on the family within the story. Taken together, these objections reflect a broader tension between the book's aim to speak honestly to teenagers navigating identity and loss, and the caution some parents and administrators bring to material addressing those same subjects; the book has been formally challenged in one state and one school district represented in this catalog.