This got off to a rough start, as we need the background of how and why Joy fakes her kidnapping from her middle-class Issaquah home and goes to live on the streets on Capitol Hill as Triste. What's rough is that her privileged and manipulative boyfriend Asher—the guy she's escaping—is just too evil to be believed, meaning in particular that Joy's initial attraction to him doesn't make sense. Of course she'd want to escape! Fortunately, once the setup is taken care of we don't really have to see him again.When the scene shifts to Capitol Hill, among the panhandlers, street rats, pimps and prostitutes, abandoned-house squats, drug addicts, and suspicious aid missions, the book gets a lot more believable. Yes, the homeless musician Creed who becomes Triste's protector is unnaturally handsome and talented, but this is fiction after all; given that, his appearance and habits and actions all feel plausible for the context. I've never been a homeless asthmatic street rat on Capitol Hill, but Cupala manages to make us believe maybe she has. Joy/Triste's reaction to and education in her new milieu feels entirely appropriate, and while the ending is (of course) happy it's not all smiles and sunshine. The asthma occasionally veers into plot device territory, but mostly stays clear.It was also nice to see Seattle from an unusual perspective, though Don't Breathe a Word seems to suffer a bit from Hollywood editing—physically impossible trajectories and juxtapositions of landmarks. Triste and crew do walk a lot, though, so maybe I just skimmed over those transitions. The one serious glitch is on p. 150, where we're told they go to "Pike's Place market"; even a coddled Issaquah teenager like Joy would know it's "Pike Place," after the plaza at the end of Pike Street, and there's no possessive, no apostrophe, and no "s" anywhere near the place. Holly, I sure hope you can blame some New York editor for that one!
