The Weight of One Pomegranate

The Weight of One Pomegranate

From the author of Orpheus Girl and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, this lyrical YA novel follows a teen who unravels a personal mystery as she tries to understand her older sister’s death. A discovery of authentic self and sapphic love—perfect for fans of Nina LaCour and Lily Braun-Arnold. Seventeen-year-old Isadora is reeling after the sudden loss of her older sister, Eleni, to a pulmonary embolism. Her grieving parents can’t offer much support—her only reprieve is her close friend Ani, but lately the intensity of her feelings for Ani have been more confusing than comforting. Then Isadora discovers secret letters in Eleni’s belongings that suggest her artist sister was hiding more from her family than Isadora ever expected. Isadora travels to her uncle’s apartment in New York City, where Eleni lived, determined to unravel the threads of her sister’s life. As she searches for clues, Isadora embraces her own sexuality and begins to fall in love. But can she learn to live when Eleni will never have the same chance? Heartbreaking and healing, this gut punch of a novel is an essential read for anyone who’s ever lost—and loved. Praise for The Weight of One Pomegranate “Introspective . . . Isadora’s distinctive voice, sprinkled with scientific facts, resonates throughout, laying bare the depths of uncertainty that can come with loss.” — Publishers Weekly “Has the urgent pacing of a mystery . . . An immersive, lyrical study of the place where love and grief intersect.” —Kirkus Reviews “A meditation on loss, familial relationships, and undiagnosed neurodivergence . . . those who devoured Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay (2017) will be right at home.” —Booklist Praise for Orpheus Girl “Raya and Sarah's story is a credit to Rebele-Henry's own teen voice, mature beyond her years. The emotionally dramatic narrative . . . rings incredibly true.” —NPR “An unflinching look at exclusion, hate and resilience.” — Ms. Magazine “A modern epic that helps us think about the older epics, and what they have still to offer us.” — Chicago Review of Books Praise for Brynne Rebele-Henry “Richly researched and exquisitely rendered.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of the National Book Award Finalist Martyr “I couldn’t get this one out of my mind. Brynne Rebele-Henry has such a singular, obsessive urgency to her voice.” —Kim Addonizio, author of the National Book Award Finalist Tell Me “With unflinching vision, Brynne Rebele-Henry pulls us into the trenches of young womanhood.” — Julia Elliott, author of The Wilds Brynne Rebele-Henry 's first novel, Orpheus Girl , appeared with Soho Teen in 2019 to critical acclaim. Her debut fiction has been called “painful and beautiful” (NPR), was named “a top 40 best LGBT Book of the Century” (Reedsy), and received the Young Adult Virginia Author Award. The Weight of One Pomegranate is her second novel. She is also the author of three award-winning poetry collections. Prologue My name is Isadora Barnes. I turned seventeen three weeks ago. I am five feet, eight inches tall, and one hundred and twenty-five pounds. I was born on March 10. I have a birthmark the color of spilled coffee on the small of my back. One of the lesser-known facts about butterflies is that they can see colors unknown to humans. The Xerces butterfly can be identified by the blue patterns on each wing: a color that has never existed on another insect, and will never exist again now that they’re extinct. This was the last thing I ever told Eleni. Fifteen hours later, she was gone. When our mother told me, her hair was covered in snow. For a second, I thought it was glitter, and that was the last beautiful thing I saw for a while. In the morning light, it looked like something precious, and I had to stop myself from reaching out and catching some of it in my hands as she shook it from her clothes and hair. In girlhood, Eleni and I were our own planet. We spent our nights paging through an illustrated copy of Anatomy of the Natural World. She showed me splays of bones that made a bird’s wing, the cycle of the migration of a butterfly. Now, in my memory, Eleni twists through the house. Dancing in the kitchen while we ate like half-starved animals, hunched over the plate of olives and bread that tasted of the chill of the refrigerator. She had big, dark eyes and a chipped front tooth that showed when she laughed. She was taller than me at five ten, with broad shoulders and a nervous, edgy way of moving, like she could spook easily. Eleni and I drank our tea and coffee the same way: with so much milk and sugar it made everyone else gag. I still know the sound of her step on the stairs. Some nights I think I hear her. I know that soon, these small things will be gone, too, as hard as I try to hold onto them. When we were young, we invented a new kind of Morse code. We’d draw a series of circles for an alphabet, and she’d leave me notes: overlapping circles