I think that my reading experience would have been enhanced by reading the physical book since the illustrator is mentioned at the beginning and has his own note. Even with that, I still found this collection of short stories and memoir-like nonfiction compelling and interested. I may pick up the physical copy in the future.
This book has a solid concept in which the main character learned how to navigate her unusual family with a mom who struggled with a mental illness and addiction and an aunt who served as her primary caregiver. The story opens with the main character putting up missing posters for her mom…again. From there, she and her aunt go on a journey to find her mom, tracking down leads that take them to NYC and DC.
Along the way, they just so happen to meet people who happen to have interacted with and remember her mom, some who come along for the ride with them. It stretches the suspension of disbelief too far for me. The characters also lack depth with most of the secondary characters existing as near caricatures. Ultimately, this book had a lot of potential that it, unfortunately, wasted.
I managed to read this book mere days before yet another school shooting, this time at a Catholic school. The call for thoughts and prayers after this one feel especially insensitive because the students were literally at a prayer service while being shot at. This book also features a religious school, modeled after a shooting that occurred at a Christian school in Tennessee, near where Sumner lives. These reasons give the book
remarkable resonance and heighten the impact beyond what Sumner’s books usually do for me. Her narratives read as good but lack a quality – difficult to put into words – that would make them rise above other similar middle grade books. Out of the books that I have read of hers, I prefer this one due to the terrible timeliness as well as the disability representation – the main character has cerebral palsy – the unconventional family – her mom was her NICU nurse and adopted her after the death of her biological mom – as well as the representation of PTSD and survivor’s guilt.
DeChambeau did a beautiful job with this story, a YA novel with a main character close enough to middle school age that I would definitely put it on my classroom shelves. In this book, the main character loves to dance has the opportunity to join the elite troop at her studio. Her looks, specifically her much larger chest, keep getting in the way though. Others around her, especially the older dancers, tease her about it. Boys and men
constantly objectify her because of it. It also causes her physical pain. (My own sister went through similar struggles in high school.) DeChambeau did an amazing job developing the main character and showing her growth through all of the struggles. I definitely recommend this book.
This book felt unfortunately mid to me. The main character, Kaya, has the opportunity to participate in a two week camp leading up to the annual Renaissance Fair. She has always dreamed of performing as the queen after her father – a performer in the archery troop – declared that she would. This summer, however, marks the second summer where her father will not perform having passed away a year and a half prior. This should
provide plenty of fodder for the author to dig deep yet she never manages to even break out the shovel. Obstacles do emerge in Kaya’s path but she solves them so quickly that she lacks the opportunity to grow from the experience. I wish I could recommend the book but, alas, I cannot.
This book, also, had a lot of potential, especially given that it comes from the prolific and award winning author, Sharon Flake. A lot of the narrative read beautiful, although as several others have noted, the odd, stilted narration of the audiobook does the bookd no favors. It appears as though he struggled to read the free verse with fluency, instead pausing at the end of lines on the page rather than at the natural point in the
sentence. Setting that aside, the story itself explores a deep heart-breaking topic with the main character struggling with agoraphobia and other symptoms brought on by a tragic event he experienced with his mother, details of which emerge slowly over the course of the narrative. Flake shows the very real effects of events like that on someone that society expects much different from: a young, black boy in the times either just after the American Civil War or in a midwestern town before the war where these characters exist as freed people. I went along with the story for quite a while, putting up with the narrator, until the plot took a turn that really made no sense based on the already established characters. Unfortunately, the ending twenty percent of the book read like a slowly deflating balloon so I cannot really recommend this one.