Just Do This One Thing for Me

June 26, 2023
Zimmerman (My Eyes Are Up Here) delivers a suspenseful novel about three siblings struggling to stay afloat after their mother’s death. With a boyfriend she only tolerates and an uninvolved father who lives two hours away, 17-year-old Drew can’t wait until she can escape to college. In the meantime, while her unreliable mother is preoccupied with shady side hustles, rule-following Drew serves as the parental figure for her acerbic 15-year-old sister Carna and guileless eight-year-old half-brother Lock. Mom constantly asks Drew to “just do this one thing for me”; this time, she requests that Drew stay home with her siblings while their mother travels from Wisconsin to Mexico to attend a New Year’s Eve Justin Timberlake concert. Things take a grim turn, however, when Drew and Carna discover their mother’s frozen body in the family’s storage shed, and Drew uncovers the depth of her illegal schemes, including receiving Social Security payments for Drew’s dead grandmother. Short chapters sometimes lend to sporadic pacing, but the siblings’ enduring relationship provides a strong through line, while cinematic prose and Drew’s wry first-person voice convey both gruesome and darkly humorous descriptions of the trio’s efforts to stay together. Characters cue as white. Ages 14–up.