Reviewed by: Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach Karen Coats Wallach, Tommy Thanks for the Trouble. Simon, 2016 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-1880-5 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-1882-9 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9–12 Parker Santé has suffered from psychogenic aphonia, an inability to speak, ever since he was in a car wreck that killed his father five years earlier. He’s also become a bit of a hard case, getting into fights and hanging out at swanky hotels in order to steal from the patrons. When he accidentally leaves his journal, which he uses for communication as well as writing dark, fairy-tale-inspired stories, at the table of a beautiful silver-haired girl, he and Zelda strike up a conversation. She informs him that she is planning to kill herself, so he persuades her to spend the day with him instead; she strikes a bargain that if he will commit to applying to college [End Page 330] and considering a future for himself, she will indeed spend the day and all of her money on him. As the day turns into a weekend, Zelda tells Parker that she was born in 1770 and is tired of living, and while he doesn’t believe that, she does make him believe that he might have a future worth pursuing. The mystical resonance of Zelda’s character is complemented by Parker’s haunting stories and Wallach’s lyrical prose, which flows between the realistic diction of a contemporary, writerly Latino teen in Parker’s narration and the more formal cadences in Zelda’s dialogue and in Parker’s stories. Those embedded tales from Parker’s journal are gems in and of themselves, and while the overall conceit that this is a college application essay doesn’t quite work, it hardly matters. Readers looking for a beautifully written philosophical romance will enjoy losing themselves in this one. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois