By Stewart Lewis
Random House Children’s, $17.99, 289 pages
ISBN 9780385740289

If the truth were only one voice message away, would you listen to the message? You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis contemplates that very question, pondering if the whole truth and nothing but the truth distorts a person’s vision of the past.

It’s been one year since Luna’s mother died in an accident along a busy New York City street. Now, feeling lonely and struggling to accept a life with her fashion model mother, Luna visits her mother’s studio and finds two valuable clues: a cuff link that is not her father’s and her mother’s cell phone, which has seven messages. Luna enlists the help of her neighbor, Oliver, and digs into the past, discovering the perfect life she’s always believed her family has may only be an illusion. Each message brings Luna one step closer to the truth about the hit and run taxi accident that left her and her young brother without a mother.

“On the way back into the city, I think of what I really knew about my mother. I knew her smell, and that she rarely cooked. I remember her big eyes, her angel laugh, her delicate hands. The way she could turn from being playful to completely serious, and how I rarely could get anything past her.”

Lewis creates a likeable bunch of characters in this novel, including some elbow-rubbing celebrity name-dropping. He poses daunting questions about truth and a parent’s obligation to shelter a child from family secrets. The young brother, Tile, captures my heart and makes me hope this family survives. The only distraction is a late-developing twist involving the father’s (unproven) fidelity. It seems out of place with this otherwise well-written novel.

Reviewed by LuAnn Schindler