Phoenix Rising deals with the effects of seventeen-year-old Helen Castle's death from cancer on the other members of her family: her parents, her twenty-year-old brother Lucas, and— especially—her sixteen-year-old sister Jessie. The story is told partly by Jessie, who has clearly been traumatized by her sister's death, and partly by Helen's journal, portions of which Jessie reads as the novel progresses. Not only do Jessie and the other members of her family eventually begin the healing process, but Helen herself, whose world we see through the journal selections, comes to terms with a life that, in her case especially, seems capricious and unjust.