Review: "Like Glass" by Jen Ferguson

Like Glass by Jen Ferguson
Published October 2026 via Heartdrum
★★★★

Just over a year ago, Tatum's sister died—suddenly, unexpectedly. Her parents went to Chamonix to bring her body home, but her father hasn't been home since, and now Tatum is determined that she won't lose him too—that it's time to go bring him home.

Now. Yes please to travel books and books with indigenous main characters (especially ones interacting with their identities in interesting ways) and the unexpected. France is not an unusual place for a YA main character to visit (I mean, to be fair, it's not an unusual place for your average North American to want to visit, either), but the way Chamonix is approached is unusual: Tatum is there as a tourist, to some degree, but her father is there to work, and Tatum does not have the slightest interest in the classic touristy things or perfect Instagram shots. Tatum's father is Métis, and he knows what that means for his life and his work, but Tatum is still figuring out what that means for herself and her art...and how much other people get to define that.

Fundamentally of course this is a story about grief: Tatum's grief over the loss of her sister, her father's grief over the same, Tatum's grief over the emotional loss (for lack of a better term) of her father in the past year. They're past the rawest of it all, but they also know that things can't be and won't be the same again, and all there is to do is tromp through the murky tomorrows. Mixed in with that is friendship—Tatum is not shy about meeting new people—and some wee hints of romance, and, unexpectedly, ski jumping, which I will not ever complain about finding in books. (The only other ski-jumping book I've read, as far as I can remember, is The Finnish Line, and even then I think that's a different type of ski jumping.) There are some definite bad decisions, but those fall shy of catastrophe, which I appreciated; it would have been pretty easy for those decisions to derail the plot, and it got to go in more interesting directions because that didn't happen.

I particularly loved the author's note at the end about labels, and why this particular book doesn't contain a lot of them—namely, that Tatum is not a person who needs or necessarily wants a lot of labels, and so they're appropriate for some characters but not so much here. A lot to think about, both in the book itself and in that note.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.