In Belzhar, Jam spends time with Reeve, her dead boyfriend, her best friend gets to hang out with a long-lost brother, and Casey isn’t in a wheelchair. But in the rest of her life, Jam and her friends are spending a year at a school for “emotionally fragile” teenagers, assigned to a mysterious “special topics” English class where they’re required to keep a journal–the same journal that takes them to Belzhar.

Whether going Belzhar is metaphor or magic for Jam and her friends is open to discussion. But for readers, it’s both.