You Are The Reason My Skye Is Blue- YA

You Are The Reason My Skye Is Blue by Sarah Jeanne Browne:

Synopsis: Payton Rose Blakely wanted to follow her grandfather Mitch’s footsteps to become a lawyer with added pressure to go to Harvard. They talked about life when she was little before he died and in their talk of morality, she realized, “Doing good makes you feel good.” However, she didn’t know what that good looked like. She struggled with her parents’ divorce, her mom Vivi’s (short for Paraskevi Paraskevopoulou), drug problem, and her stepmom, Corelle who considered herself the greatest Life Coach to ever live but ironically had no idea about life and just copied others’ tricks in the trade, trying to force a family. Payton didn’t share it with anyone though, but her true dream was to sing. It took meeting Skye, a stranger running away from human traffickers at a train station, to convince Payton to live for her own song and to find her voice through love and loss. They found love in a short amount of time teaching Payton that love is beyond reason and made a promise to always be authentic before Skye disappeared. Payton was swept up in a love triangle when she reconnected with her childhood love, Everard Dean Westwood, who planned to host a suicide prevention ball with the help of his mom Kiah in memory of his dad Forrest who died by suicide. Everard had his own brush with death. He wanted to climb mountains, eventually Mount Everest. However he first traveled to Morocco where his family is from to check out the High Atlas Mountains. There was an earthquake, and he was affected. He went into a coma. Payton waited for him as she decided how to be an independent person who was not just obsessed with love. Payton’s stepbrother, Aonas, was an autistic child perseverating on weather topics where they made their own creatures such as Cyclone Cyclops but he saw through his own eye with seer-like qualities, and was worth fighting for and protecting. Payton learned her twin Yvonne died at birth but suddenly she started to be coached by her spirit to sing to heal others with a different take on law vs ethics. But Yvonne couldn’t stay. There was some price to be paid. Payton had to walk the brilliant road, the spiritual road of authenticity. Every road has its reason, to rise above to unseen brilliance.

Payton’s class list (so far). Dystopian Lit; Encountering the Holocaust through Literature; Fashion Design; Ethnomusicology; Bioethics; Democratic Origins with a focus on Ancient Greece; Global Politics; and Transformative Justice. Some of these are from George School so will get in touch with them at some point. See below for a magical moment of 222!

Co-curricular transcript