the Girl Water Remembers

Some girls are remembered. Marie Santos refuses to be forgotten.Marie is thirteen years old, loves the deep-sea barreleye fish, and has plans for her life. Big ones. Then one ordinary Tuesday night, cutting through an alley on her way home - hungry, thinking about dinner - she is caught in the crossfire of a government drug war and everything changes in an instant.Now Marie exists in a warm, golden in-between, watching over the neighborhood she grew up in and the people she loves most: her mother Nena, who runs the corner store with quiet fierce devotion; her older brother Rodel, drowning in a guilt he can't speak out loud; and her best friend Ligaya, who finds Marie's hidden diary and refuses to let a four-page government report be the last word on who Marie was.The report calls her a case number. A closed file. Collateral.Marie knows better. And from where she stands - in the dusk that never ends, guided by a ghost who has been waiting thirty-one years for his own truth to be told - she is going to make sure everyone else knows better too.The Girl the Water Remembers is a tender, lyrical young adult novel about memory, justice, and the radical power of being truly known. Part ghost story, part small-town mystery, part love letter to the specific and irreplaceable lives that a drug war tries to reduce to statistics - this is a story about what remains when everything else is taken away.