The Different Girl

December 15, 2012
Four nearly identical girls living with their teachers on a tropical island have difficulty getting along with a new girl who seems different from them in this unusual and enigmatic science-fiction outing. Written entirely from the point of view of one of the island girls, Veronika, the simple prose slowly reveals who--or what--the girls might be. At first glance, the only difference appears to be hair color, but each turns out to have a different focus. They spend their days learning in their classroom from adults Robbert and Irene and taking observational walks. The girls look closely at everything they see, describing it all when they return. Robbert strives to hide the girls from any outside eyes and makes sure they don't get wet. Things go awry when Veronika discovers May washed up on the beach, apparently the survivor of a shipwreck. Once she recovers from her injuries, May rejects the four girls and flees, but when an outside danger intrudes, it's May who steps up to save them. Dahlquist trusts his audience to notice his sparse but clear clues in order to decipher the true differences between May and the four island girls, and astute readers will have little difficulty with his scenario. The author never reveals why the girls are hidden away and what their purpose might be, leaving that to readers' imaginations. Most intriguing. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2013

Gr 7 Up-With The Different Girl, Dahlquist presents a cryptic vision of the future through the eyes of artificial intelligence. Life has always been the same for four teens. The girls study their island with the help of their teachers. Each day is the same: walking and talking and building upon the things they learned in the days before until it is time for the teachers to put them to sleep. But when May arrives, life begins to change at a frightening pace. The narrator, Veronika, knows only what her teachers tell her and what she is able to observe. Readers must rely heavily on imagination and inference to puzzle out the circumstances of the world beyond the island and the extreme secrecy that seems to surround the four robotic girls and their handlers. Fans of science fiction and dystopian societies will find plenty to pique their interest, but little to satisfy their questions.-Sara Saxton, Tuzzy Consortium Library, Barrow, AK

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2013
Four girls, alone on an island, cared for by Irene and Robbert. Four girls all the same, and all doing "almost always the exact thing as one another." Identical except for hair color -- Isobel's is lemon yellow, Caroline's brown, Eleanor's black, and Veronika's red -- the girls are orphans, knowing only that their parents were killed in a plane crash. They have no memories of their parents, but Dahlquist drops hints as to who -- what -- these girls are: they must learn how to walk uphill and downhill, up and down stairs, and on sand; they have buttons behind their ears that Irene pushes to turn them off into sleep at night. When Veronika finds a strange girl washed up on the shore, their lives are changed. May screams when she sees the others. "What are you?" she exclaims, and the existence of May changes everything: "From now on we were us compared to her," Veronika notes. "May was showing us something about ourselves." But who is the titular different girl? Is it newcomer May, startled by the four girls she encounters? Is it Veronika, who learns to see possibility and has a poet's appreciation for how "the stars rolled past above us, bright stitches on a deep dark blanket"? Or Caroline, who acts selflessly when danger comes? Veronika's simple, sometimes profound first-person narration explores the nature of identity and what it means to be human in an oddly touching story of a future world. dean schneider

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

July 1, 2013
Four girls, alone on an island, have no memories of their parents, but Dahlquist drops hints as to who--what--these girls are: they have buttons behind their ears that their caretaker pushes to turn them off into sleep at night. A simple, sometimes profound first-person narration explores what it means to be human in an oddly touching story of a future world.

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)