You Are The Reason My Skye Is Blue- YA

You Are The Reason My Skye Is Blue asks profound questions and leads you onto the brilliant road of the mystery and beauty of life itself. Take the authentic road and find your true path. It contains the sentence (as a few of her books do) “Every road has its reason, to rise above to unseen brilliance.” The main theme of the novel is "resilience through authenticity." There is a focus on relational activism. She is not her characters. And she enjoys making fun of them. Mimi Page inspired her to make her YA character Payton a singer at heart. It has a huge focus on grief inspired by Mimi Page’s “Porcelain (Moby Cover)." She created an Unseen Brilliance program for the characters at a suicide prevention ball one hosts. She hopes one day this will be utilized for youth in real life. Her children’s book Brilliant Road and the Red Balloon is a sequel in a way to this. She will share here on MOTIFS that at the end of the Brilliant Road is the The Tree Of Life from which The Gold Grief Leaf falls. The Red Balloon is a mindfulness containment exercise. All her books are connected in some way. This has magical realism. Some literary nonsense. The Everglow is a place Payton and someone she loses have a closure conversation in not a real time or place but this is a spiritual place. I googled it afterward the definition "What does Everglow stand for? It means warmth and happiness when sadness comes to your mind with a relationship with someone has ended." Cool! I did not know that.

Synopsis: Payton Rose Blakely wanted to follow her grandfather Mitch’s footsteps to become a lawyer with added pressure to go to Harvard. They talked about life when she was little before he died and in their talk of morality, she realized, “Doing good makes you feel good.” However, she didn’t know what that good looked like. She struggled with her parents’ divorce, her mom Vivi’s (short for Paraskevi Paraskevopoulou), drug problem, and her stepmom, Corelle who considered herself the greatest Life Coach to ever live but ironically had no idea about life and just copied others’ tricks in the trade, trying to force a family. Payton didn’t share it with anyone though, but her true dream was to sing. It took meeting Skye, a stranger running away from human traffickers at a train station, to convince Payton to live for her own song and to find her voice through love and loss. They found love in a short amount of time teaching Payton that love is beyond reason and made a promise to always be authentic before Skye disappeared. Payton was swept up in a love triangle when she reconnected with her childhood love, Everard Dean Westwood, who planned to host a suicide prevention ball with the help of his mom Kiah in memory of his dad Forrest who died by suicide, and Everard had his own brush with death. She offered to help and rekindle their romance. Payton’s stepbrother, Aonas, was an autistic child perseverating on weather topics where they made their own creatures such as Cyclone Cyclops but he saw through his own eye with seer-like qualities, and was worth fighting for and protecting. Payton learned her twin Yvonne died at birth but suddenly she started to be coached by her spirit to sing to heal others - some, even miraculously or magically. But Yvonne couldn’t stay. There was some price to be paid. Payton had to walk the brilliant road, the spiritual road of authenticity. Every road has its reason, to rise above to unseen brilliance.

NOTE: The book goes well beyond this but I don’t have an updated synopsis to include everything. So stay tuned!

Payton’s class list (so far). Dystopian Lit; Encountering the Holocaust through Literature; Fashion Design; Ethnomusicology; Bioethics; Democratic Origins with a focus on Ancient Greece; Global Politics; and Transformative Justice. Some of these are from George School so not sure if have to change title! Her extracurricular is quite long will keep private for now.

There is a Sphinx. Just a warning. You’ll have to get through them too!