On the first day of senior year, quiet and sensitive Lin Wan runs into a boy outside the academic affairs office, clutching his transfer papers so tightly his knuckles turn white. He is Jiang Xu, a physics competition student from the provincial capital. A seating chart makes them deskmates, and a composition book brings their parallel lines together: he writes, "I come from a city without stars," and she writes beside it, "I live in a small town filled with the sound of cicadas."
But Jiang Xu's arrival is no coincidence. A sealed medical case from seventeen years ago binds their families together. Jiang Xu's grandmother and Lin Wan's mother share a past they dare not speak of. Amid the endless exam questions and the sound of cicadas, they battle monthly tests and inner demons while being forced to uncover the answers left behind by the previous generation. Their friends, too, are caught up in their own struggles: class monitor Chen Yu, who secretly draws, and Su Xiaotang, the bold and passionate head of the radio station, both come face-to-face with their own obsessions that summer.
The college entrance exams end, the old case is cleared up, and farewells arrive at the station alongside confessions of love. Years later, a postcard from a northern observatory arrives through the sound of cicadas. Growing up means opening with your own hands the door you've spent your whole life trying to avoid.
Not bad, recommended