In Story of a Girl, Sara Zarr builds a character whose world is so real and inner mind so clearly imagined that readers feel like we may have pressed pause our own lives and zoomed into a close-up of the girl behind the counter at the pizza joint. The one who looks like something’s wrong, but we’ll never know what. Here, we get to know. And the story we zoom into is rich and layered and depicts one of those crucial moments when a person becomes something different than what she’s been. That’s what I love about YA, the simple unabashedness of becoming.