by Nina LaCour
First published 2020
Mila has just aged out of foster care. She has no family, no permanent address, and no clear path forward. When someone offers her a teaching position on a remote farm along the Northern California coast, she says yes without hesitation. The farm sits above cliffs where fog rolls in off the water and wildflowers grow in the salt air. It feels, for the first time, like somewhere she could stay. But the farm is not empty in the ways she expected. There are ghosts here, figures from the past that move through the property and press against the edges of daily life. And as Mila settles into her new routines, her own buried memories begin to surface too. The trauma she carried through years in the foster system does not stay quiet just because she has finally found solid ground. Watch Over Me is a modern ghost story that holds two things at once: the slow, careful work of building a life, and the way the past refuses to be left behind. Nina LaCour, who won the Printz Award for We Are Okay, writes about chosen family and survival with precision and emotional force. This is a book about what it means to belong somewhere, and what it costs to get there.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, contemporary, ghost-stories, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, contemplative, emotionally-resonant, haunting, introspective, lyrical
Tropes: found-family, haunted-location, past-resurfaces, slow-burn
Setting: Northern California, Remote Farm, Coastal Cliffs
Period: Contemporary
288 pages · Paperback · Rocky Pond Books
Content warnings: abuse, mental-illness