Review of the Day: A Scar Like a River by Lisa Graff

A Scar Like a River
By Lisa Graff
Christy Ottaviano Books (an imprint of Little, Brown)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-314-57080-0
Ages 9-12
On shelves February 3rd

When I was a kid, my best friend loved difficult books. This was utterly baffling to me. For the most part they had previously liked a lot of what I liked. The Baby-Sitters Club series. Trixie Belden titles. Roald Dahl’s The Witches. But on occasion they’d seek out more realistic, darker fare. J.T. by Jane Wagner, for example. For my part, I was the kid who avoided Julie of the Wolves and Island of the Blue Dolphins like the plague because I sensed that they were too serious for me (and don’t even TALK to me about Bridge to Terabithia!). Had A Scar Like a River fallen into our laps, my friend would have devoured it in a single setting. I would not. I would have taken one look and figured it was a story here that might not gel with my preferences. Kids are incredible self-selectors. They know what they generally can and cannot handle. Of course, for all that Graff has written the most serious book of her career, she still has the incredible ability to fill the book with good jokes and real humor. This is not an easy read, but by god it may be one of the best.

Fallon doesn’t talk about how she got the scar on her face. It happened years ago when she was just five-years-old, but no matter how much her parents asked, she never said who did it. Now she’s thirteen and her Uncle Geebie has just died in a car accident. Little does Fallon suspect that the funeral will be the catalyst that sets everything off. Her Aunt Lune, for example, with whom she has never seen eye-to-eye, is coming to live with her family. And then her two best friends Trent and Kaia start to become a lot more than just friends with one another. And all that could be fine, if it weren’t for the secrets Fallon’s been sitting on all these years. Not just one secret. Three. She’s determined never to tell them to anyone, but sometimes secrets like these have a way of coming to light, whether you intend them to or not.

There’s a lot to admire about this book. For example, how Graff chooses to parcel out her information is a masterclass in timing. No one in their right mind would call this book a mystery, but reading through these pages you have to be somewhat in awe of how information is disseminated to the reader. You have to be sympathetic to Fallon, even when her actions don’t yet make a lot of sense to the reader. She’s seemingly making bad choices and you’re in the dark as much as other people. Graff is also sort of counting on you to forget that there’s more than one secret Fallon is hiding. The fact that her uncle scarred her face when she was young is such a big and horrific act (one that’s revealed relatively early) that it probably never even occurs to the average reader that there might be even more to the story. Personally, I didn’t expect the final secrets to come out when they did. It’s around pages 290 or 291 that everything really comes to a head. That’s about 100 pages before the end of the story, which is a generous portion to leave for the reader. At first I was shocked, but I came to really appreciate the extra time. This isn’t the kind of story that you can wrap up in a hurry or anything.

Sexual abuse, like the kind that this book contains, does show up in children’s middle grade fiction periodically. I’ve seen it in a range of different books, to varying degrees of description. To those who would declare that it is never necessary in any book for younger readers, one may merely point out that considering the sheer number of kids who live through such experiences, information is always important (and Graff takes care to provide help and support in the back of her book). Understanding that books like A Scar Like a River exist not to exploit the topic but inform and fill a need, this title was pretty straightforward, but not violent in its description of what Fallon experiences (the violence comes more in the form of a knife to the face later). There is no mistake that what Fallon experiences is abusive, and I thought Graff took a deft hand to what had to be an almost impossible scene to write. What particularly impressed me, too, was the sexual abuse survivor support group that Fallon manages to find for herself. It’s a little messy, like actual groups can be, but still begins to heal that wound Fallon has carried solo for so wrong. All told, I suppose that this is a book destined for middle school libraries. But, as I mentioned before, what happens to Fallon happens and has happened to younger kids all the time. It’s a book that could do a lot of good when it finds the right audience. An excellent accompaniment to Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s Fighting Words.

There’s a moment near the end of the book when Fallon’s mom tells her daughter that, “Every time life throws something awful your way – and it sure has thrown you some awful stuff – you change, of course, but you just get better.” But Fallon isn’t some saintly little do-gooder without a flaw. She’s strong and obtuse. Capable of great love and great blind spots. Now imagine having to write such a character. Oh, and make her funny too. It’s the humor of the book that is so tricky and, also, so necessary. Sometimes an author just works themselves up to the book of a lifetime and you are lucky enough to watch that happen in real time. That’s pretty much what we have here. The kids that get to read this book for the first time are lucky too. A necessary story that hits all the right marks.

On shelves February 3rd

Source: Final copy sent by publisher for review.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Reviews, Reviews 2026