Library Journal
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DEBUT While taking her self-portrait for the 400th time, photographer Lu Rile captures the very moment that her neighbors' young son Max falls to his death. When she enlarges the image, his blond curls and untied shoelaces are clearly depicted in the background. At the artists' loft in New York City where they live, all the neighbors unite to comfort grieving parents Kate and Steve, and Lu becomes close to Kate. She confides to Kate that Max haunts her, making tapping sounds on the glass and that sometimes she sees the image of his intact body coming through the window. Lu considers her photograph a masterpiece and with ruthless determination has it shown at a nearby gallery without telling Kate and Steve of her plan. "Self-Portrait with Boy" is a big hit, gaining favorable attention from the art world, but Lu's actions create awful repercussions. VERDICT Fabulously written, this spellbinding debut novel is a real page-turner. A powerful, brilliantly imagined story not easily forgotten; highly recommended.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* Lu Rile is a struggling photographer working a series of minimum-wage jobs to pay for film and the rent for her loft in a converted warehouse in early 1990s New York City. As an artistic exercise, she challenges herself to create a self-portrait a day. Self-Portrait #400, taken in front of her window, accidentally includes a child falling to his death from the building's roof. Lu is horrified by the photo but also immediately recognizes that it is the best work she has ever made. Intending to show it to the boy's parents and seek their permission to share the image, she instead finds herself becoming a confidante to his mother, Kate, and supporting her as her marriage unravels under the weight of grief. Through Kate, Lu secures an opportunity to exhibit the photo and launch her career, but doing so will mean destroying their friendship. In her gripping first novel, Lyon sympathetically portrays Lu's struggle to make this impossible decision and to deal with its repercussions.--Harmon, Lindsay Copyright 2018 Booklist

Publishers Weekly
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Lyon's candid, adroit debut follows a young artist's disturbing journey to find an audience. Lu Rile is a photographer squatting in a clapped-out industrial building in gritty 1990s Brooklyn. While staging a self-portrait, she accidentally captures a boy falling to his death outside her window. Although she has shot hundreds of images, this photograph is different, perfect. The boy's tragic death creates a close community among the building's tenants, mostly artists, and Lu becomes the confidant of Kate, the boy's mother, who lives upstairs. Lu struggles to make ends meet and to find a gallery to represent her work, neglecting all along to tell Kate about her brilliant photograph. She manages to place it in an upcoming group exhibition in which Kate's husband, Steve, also has a work, and tension mounts. Exacerbating Lu's uncertainty about whether she is doing the right thing, she believes the ghost of the child is appearing at same window from which she captured him falling. But even this is not enough to push her to confess to his mother or pull the photograph from the show. Written in raw, honest prose, this is an affecting and probing moral tale about an artist choosing to advance her work at the expense of her personal relationships. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

When an ambitious young photographer captures an unthinkable tragedyand creates an accidental masterpiece in the processshe is forced to make a choice that will define her future.Thick with the atmospheric grime of early 1990s New York, Lyon's haunting debut hinges on a single instant: the moment when recent art school graduate Lu Rile, broke and ruthless, sets up her camera for a self-portraitthe 400th in her seriesand captures, by chance, the image of a little boy falling from the sky. The boy is Max Schubert-Fine, the 9-year-old son of Lu's upstairs neighbors, and now he is dead, having slipped off the roof of their building, a crumbling Brooklyn warehouse not officially zoned for tenancy. The building's motley crew of residentsall artists; who else could live there?come together in the aftermath of the tragedy, rallying around Max's beautiful mother, Kate, and offering Lu, until now a loner, something like community. In the weeks that follow, Kate and Lu form an intense and complicated friendship, united in loneliness, held together by a flicker of unspoken attraction. But Lu doesn't tell Kate about the photograph of her son falling, the photograph that couldthat willfundamentally change the course of Lu's career, offering her an escape from both poverty and obscurity, a name and a paycheck. (God knows Lu, whose father is ailing, needs the money.) From its first sentences, the novel is hurtling toward its inevitable and nauseating conclusion as Lu chooses between her friendship and her art, a choice that wasn't ever really a choice at all. More than a book about art, or morality, it is a book about time: Lyon captures the end of an era. Lu, after this, for better and worse, will never be the person she was before the photograph. And as the warehouses get developed and the rents rise, the city won't ever be the same, either.Fearless and sharp. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.