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One Last Chance to Live

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

What would you do if you had one last summer to live?

Nico has always believed in his dreams. Especially the dream he has of becoming a writer; it's the reason why he started taking a creative writing class his senior year of high school. But then Nico has a dream about his own funeral. A dream that feels too real to ignore.

In it, Rosario is beckoning to him. Rosario was Nico's neighbor, his best friend's girlfriend, and his inspiration. She was also the girl that Nico was in love with. And Rosario died last year.

Nico becomes obsessed with figuring out what Rosario was trying to say to him, and how she died. Surely if he can make sense of her death, he can find a way to prevent his own?

But at the same time, Nico's mom is sick, and his brother is falling down a bad path with a local gang. Nico knows it's on him to step up and take care of his family — but how can he keep it together when, like Rosario, he sees how easy it might be to just let go of it all.

This searingly beautiful and hopeful novel is about the search for a life of meaning and creativity, while also accepting the flawed life that we're given. It's a love story between a teen boy and the girl who still haunts his dreams.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 24, 2024
      A grieving teen from the Bronx turns a class journal into a lifeline in this high-stakes page-turner from Stork (I Am Not Alone). “Half Mexican” 17-year-old Nico, who aspires to become a “great writer,” works at the fish market before school and sells weed for the X-Teca gang. His routines are thrown asunder by an eerie dream about his deceased unrequited love, Puerto Rican–cued Rosario, which seems to prophesize his death, as well as the deaths of his mother and 12-year-old half brother Javier. When his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer and Javier begins his X-Teca initiation, Nico’s dream starts to feel real. In response, he dedicates his AP English journal to investigating how college-bound Rosario—whose writerly ambitions inspired Nico’s future plans—died via a heroin overdose. By understanding Rosario’s life, will Nico be able to save his own? As he works through his unresolved grief and struggles to cope with worsening home dynamics, Nico’s daily writing assignments morph into a “novelesque... journal on
      steroids” that probes honesty, truth, and a writer’s way of life. Plainly yet piercingly voiced by a complex, flawed protagonist navigating tough choices, this immersive tale concludes with a brief—and powerful—message of hope. Ages 12–up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group.

    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2024
      Nico wants to write his way out of his life, but does he have what it takes? Seventeen-year-old Nico Kardos wants to be a writer. He also wants to go to Sarah Lawrence College and get away from his Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, where the girl he'd loved his whole life, Rosario Zamora, died from a heroin overdose six months earlier and where Javier, his younger half brother, is headed for a cruel, hard life in the local gang, the X-Tecas. One night Nico has what he believes to be a prophetic dream about his own death and the deaths of his mom and Javier. In the dream, Rosario appears and says something to him that he can't recall when he wakes up. When Nico's mother falls seriously ill just one week later, he wonders whether he can change his future--and whether he wants to. Is he fated to follow in Rosario's footsteps? In this story that unfolds in the form of journal entries for his AP English class, Nico's interior monologue feels raw and real, expressed in an authentic, youthful voice. The grittiness of his reality--absent fathers, the need for money, and the desire for bigger things--is at the core of award-winner Stork's latest. At times the journal entries make narrative jumps that feel jolting, but the novel moves at a quick clip and is hard to put down. All major characters are Latine. An honest, brutal exploration of reality.(Fiction. 13-18)

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • School Library Journal

      September 1, 2024

      Gr 10 Up-One night, 17-year-old aspiring writer Nico Kardos, who is Mexican American, has a dream in which he is dead and is visited by the love of his life, Rosario Zamora, who died of a heroin overdose six months before. Convinced that he will be dead within the year upon waking and driven mad by the unremembered thing Rosario whispered in his ear during the dream, Nico's life becomes fractured. Between his desires to write something worthwhile and find out what truly happened to Rosario, he is overwhelmed. His mother's sickness is worsening; his 12-year-old brother is on the verge of joining the same gang that's pressuring Nico to run drugs. And, he has a chance encounter with a young woman he swears is Rosario's doppelg�nger. Told over the course of two months and written as entries in Nico's creative writing journal, Stork's newest novel is a deeply emotional look at both the beauty of the creative process and the pain that can be found there, as well as an examination of the oppression and suffering that are in place in the world. The introspection that fills the pages of Nico's journal may be too verbose for some readers-and indeed, there are some passages and dialogue that don't feel teen-voiced-but every reader who has ever wanted to create will sympathize with Nico's plight, as will those who know all too well the obstacles Nico faces. VERDICT A moving portrayal of a teen confronting the world and himself. Recommended.-Tyler Hixson

      Copyright 2024 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from September 15, 2024
      Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Like others in Hunts Point in the Bronx, Nico has been mourning the loss of Rosario, his neighbor and an aspiring writer everyone thought would be a star. But his grief has shifted to obsession, preventing him from helping his mother as she succumbs to cancer or his brother as he sinks deeper into gang life. To uncover the secrets surrounding Rosario's death, Nico dares to seek answers from the seedier elements of Hunts Point at significant threat to those around him. The book follows Nico's journal entries--ostensibly kept for a writing class--revealing his preoccupation with Rosario is based in the hope of escaping to a better life. Even so, he is tough and world-weathered, a junior Philip Marlowe with a knack for knowing the right lies to escape a tight spot. But the biggest threat to finding the truth about Rosario and saving himself may just be his own demons. Stork once again delivers an impactful and ambitious work as he combines his penchant for Latin American narratives with a classic noir detective story. It's unflinching regarding life's greater challenges--drugs, sex, and violence are de rigueur in these characters' lives--but that grittiness is the strength of this engrossing and expertly realized tale.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • The Horn Book

      March 1, 2025
      Nico Kardos is a Mexican American high school senior from the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx. He works at a fish market in the morning and sells drugs for the local gang but is taking creative writing in school to pursue his dream of being a writer. (Nico narrates his story through class-assigned journal entries.) Rosario Zamora -- his childhood friend, unrequited crush, and fellow aspiring writer -- died six months ago of a heroin overdose, and Nico is still grieving. In a vivid dream that portends his own death and those of his mother and younger brother, Rosario appears and says something to him that he cannot remember afterward. The dream drives him to explore the circumstances of her death, even as his family situation worsens: his mother's health deteriorates, and his younger brother seems poised to join the same gang. It's a lot for a young man to handle, and Stork juggles the multiple plot strands adeptly, laying bare Nico's introspective thoughts in spare prose, with evergreen issues (coming of age, grief and loss, the power of literacy) and enough mystery to keep the pages turning. Jonathan Hunt

      (Copyright 2025 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

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