This Means War! by Ellen Wittlinger

This is a great little book.  By little, I mean it’s a quick read, not that it’s little in terms of ideas, story or characters.  There comes a time in some kids’ lives when their relationships with kids of the opposite sex become not quite so easy.  Or downright hostile, in Julie’s case.  She and Lowell have been best friends forever, but now that he is friends with the new kids, twins Mike and Tommy, he treats Julie like she has cooties.  And it couldn’t happen at a worse time.  It’s 1962 and Julie is afraid that America is going to go to war with Russia over Cuba, and that Russia will fire missiles at us, which, since she lives near a big air base, puts her and her family in danger.  Some kids’ families have even built fallout shelters.  Then a new girl, Patsy, moves to the neighborhood.  At first, she helps take Julie’s mind off of things, but then Patsy gets into a battle with an older boy in the neighborhood, and suddenly Julie is dragged into a series of challenges to prove who is better –boys or girls, and it isn’t long before things get dangerous.  I’ll just warn you:  there are some serious consequences to the things the kids get involved in, but don’t let it stop you from reading the book.  You can’t help rooting for Julie to overcome her fear of how out of control the world seems to her. Review by Stacy Church

How I, Nicky Flynn, Finally Get a Life (and a Dog) by Art Corriveau

Life has been treating Nicky pretty unfairly lately.  He had to move with his mom from their really nice house in a suburb outside of Boston to a tiny, run-down apartment in Charlestown.  His mom works all the time now, and never seems to have the energy to make dinner.  She also drinks too much wine and watches too much TV.  Then instead of bringing home groceries, she brings home an 80-pound German shepherd named Reggie.  Nicky doesn’t even want a dog.  He tries to make her take him back, but his mom is determined to keep him.  As Nicky gets attached to Reggie, he becomes obsessed with finding out who his former owner was and why he was given up for adoption.  Nicky’s obsession leads him to explore his new neighborhood and make some new friends.  Unfortunately, he lies to the new people he meets, pretending to be Reggie’s previous owner’s grandson in order to get information from them, and of course, in the end, he tells too many lies to get away with.  Nicky’s mom makes him go to a therapist to deal with his feelings about the divorce, and Nicky refuses to talk to him.  I’ve never heard of a therapist treating a parent for 1/2 an hour and a kid for the other 1/2 hour, and it doesn’t seem realistic that Nicky’s mom expects the dog to eat human food because she refuses to buy more than one can of food at a time.  I hate how Nicky endangers Reggie’s life by dragging him into his own drama, but I guess it could happen.  All in all, I enjoyed reading about Nicky and Reggie, but the book was far from perfect.  Review by Stacy Church

Little Blog on the Prairie by Cathleen Davitt Bell

This book is a hilarious account of what happens when a nice, normal 13-year-old girl is forced to spend her summer at Camp Frontier having an authentic 1890’s pioneer experience instead of doing the kinds of things most 13-year-old girls in America do in the summer.  You know, there’s a reason why society has progressed, and the reason is that life in the 1890’s wasn’t all that great: no indoor plumbing, no screens on your windows, no heat for cooking or bathing unless you cut and haul wood…I could go on and on.  At first I was too afraid that the snarky heroine of the book, Genevieve, was going to end up getting all mushy about how changed she was from the experience to really enjoy how funny the writing is.  Of course that is kind of what happens in the end, but not before Gen gets in a lot of digs at the owners of the camp, their nasty daughter Nora, and frontier life in general.  Even though campers are supposed to surrender all their personal belongings when they arrive at the camp, Gen makes enough of a fuss that her mom insists they let her keep her tube of Clearasil, in which she has hidden the new cell phone her mom promised her in exchange for her giving in gracefully (relatively gracefully, anyway) about the vacation.  When Gen starts feeling the pain of frontier life, she takes the phone out to the fields and texts some very funny messages to her friends back home.  What she doesn’t know is that her friends turn them into a blog, and before they know it, there are lots of people reading about Gen’s adventures on the frontier: “Week 1 – Monday 11:16 am  I am standing in the middle of a cornfield.  I am holding a hoe.  As my mom said when we were setting off to work in the field, we are farmers now.”  “Week 1 – Monday 11:17 am  Here’s the thing: being a farmer is BORING.  I am halfway down one row, there are ten rows to go, and it’s already taken TWO HOURS.” “Week 1 – Monday 1:24 pm You know what’s worse than being caught by your little brother singing “Beat It” at the top of your lungs while you do a  little corn-weeding dance?  Having him follow you down the row singing, “Showin’ how funky and strong is your fight.  It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right,” doing a little dance of his own, and stopping only to say, ‘Come on, Gen, you know you’re feeling it.’  All morning long.” There’s some romance and intrigue along the way, too.  Review by Stacy Church

Palace Beautiful by Sarah DeFord Williams

  “’My name is Sadie Evelyn Brooks.  I’m thirteen years old and practically a woman.  I love painting, Frosty Cocoa Flakes cereal and my family.  I hate stomachaches, spiders and saying good-bye.  July 5, 1985.’  That’s what I wrote on the inside of my bathroom cabinet just before we hopped in the car to leave Texas for good. That way, even if it was just in the bathroom, I’d always be a part of the story of the house where I used to live.”  What a great beginning!   Soon after Sadie moves into her new house, she finds what a previous resident left behind: the words “Palace Beautiful” handpainted over the doorway of a tiny room in the attic, and inside the room, an diary from 1918 written by Helen White.  Sadie, her sister Zuzu, and their new friend Bella limit their reading of the diary to 3 entries at a time to make it last longer, and they become determined to find out what happened to Helen White after the terrible flu epidemic killed most of her family.  Although some of the story elements seemed a little over the top (the names Sadie gives to colors, like Judgment-Day White and Sugar-Punch Pink), I really enjoyed the characters, and the way the two stories paralleled each other.  Review by Stacy Church

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Deep in rural China, a young girl named Minli lives with her parents in a gray, mud-covered village at the foot of Fruitless Mountain.  The mountain is barren now, and the people in the village are poor.  Minli’s father tells her stories of ancient China and of a time when the people were rich and prosperous.  Minli believes the magic stories and sets out on a journey to bring back wealth and happiness to her family and her village.  On her quest she meets a dragon who cannot fly.  They become good friends, and together they make their way through dangerous forests and cities to find the Old Man of the Moon, who is the Guardian of the Book of Fortune.  Minli believes that the Old Man of the Moon has the power to help the dragon fly, as a proper dragon should, and to grant her own wish for wealth and good luck for her family.  Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a fast-paced, magical story that will take you on a fantastic journey of adventure through ancient China.  Review by Trudy Walsh

The Dog in the Wood by Monika Schröder

This book takes place in April, 1945, right at the end of World War II, in eastern Germany. 10-year-old Fritz lives with his mother, older sister, grandmother, and grandfather (who is a Nazi sympathizer). There is a lot of uncertainty as the Soviet army gets closer to their town. Some people look forward to their coming, but Fritz’s family situation is a little different, and after the announcement comes of Hitler’s death, his grandparents kill themselves. Things get even worse: after the Russians take over, their farm is taken away, and they have to leave to go live with his other grandmother, someone Fritz has never warmed up to. At least Lech, the Polish farmhand who has been like a second father to Fritz, comes along with them. Fritz learns the difference between a friend who cares more about himself (his childhood best friend Paul pulls Fritz in front of him when a drunken Russian soldier points a gun at them) and a true friend like his new friend Konrad, who borrows a bicycle for Fritz to use to try to track down his mother and Lech after they are taken prisoner by the Russians. This is a sad book, and there is no happy ending, but Fritz learns to rely on the people who really care about him, and how to stand up for what he believes in. Review by Stacy Church

The Homeschool Liberation League by Lucy Frank

I didn’t expect too much from this book when I started it, but after reading for a while, I realized there was a lot more to it than I thought there would be.  Katya can’t stand the prospect of starting school again.  Mostly she just can’t face another mind-numbing year.  She spent the summer going to a wilderness camp where she learned all kinds of interesting things about nature –how to forage for edible plants, how to identify alien invasive plant species.  She also doesn’t like the person she becomes when she’s at school –she still cringes when she remembers the essay she wrote about their principal, Mr. Westenburg, and his supposed affair with his secretary, Ms. Pinchbeck, which her friend Danny read over the PA.  “At camp there was no need for me to start trouble.  At camp I didn’t worry if I was good enough or too good, not perfect enough or too perfect for anyone to like me.” Katya is so freaked out on the first day of school that she runs away –from school, that is.  She puts together a presentation to convince her parents to homeschool her.  They are completely against the idea, until they go with her to the principal’s office and realize that they don’t like his attitude very much.  Against their better judgment, they decide to give it a try.  There are some interesting side stories and characters, like old Mr. Horton who comes in to Katya’s mother’s salon for pedicures because he’s diabetic and needs her to check his feet for sores.  It turns out that he is an amateur naturalist and he helps Katya rescue a beaver she finds trapped under a log.  There’s even a romantic interest –Milo, a violin prodigy she hears playing in a field near her house one day, who turns out to be homeschooled, too.  Review by Stacy Church

The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet by Erin Dionne

I really enjoyed reading this book!  It’s hard to imagine a situation more embarrassing than the one Hamlet Kennedy has to face as she’s starting 8th grade.  First of all there’s her name.  Then there’s the fact that not only are her parents Shakespearean scholars at the local college, they also dress in Shakespearean clothing (complete with capes with bells in her mother’s case, and tights in her father’s) and speak only Shakespearean English (no contractions allowed).  These are things that Hamlet has dealt with her whole life, although heading into 8th grade they seem a little worse than when she was younger.  The thing that really pushes the envelope is that Hamlet’s younger sister, Desdemona, who is a certifiable genius at the age of 7 (IQ over 200), will only be allowed to enter college if she takes arts classes for credit at the local middle school.  That’s right, the same middle school where Hamlet goes.  Luckily Hamlet has a really great circle of friends who already know all about her strange home life.  Unluckily there are a couple of mean girls who quickly decide to make Desdemona their pet so they can cheat from her.  One of the things I like about the book is that the author avoids turning Hamlet into an angry character who refuses to acknowledge her family in public.  Even when she is pretty angry at the way Desdemona is acting, she feels too much sympathy for her as a really out-of-place under-aged kid at school to really take it out on her.  By the end, Hamlet and Desdemona team up to get revenge on the mean girls.  Review by Stacy Church

Watching Jimmy by Nancy Hartry

I love Carolyn, the main character of Watching Jimmy. She feels a lot of regret about what happened to her best friend Jimmy. She thinks she should have yelled at her Aunt Jean not to leave them alone with her brother, Uncle Ted, or that she could have run faster when Uncle Ted went zooming off down the street with Jimmy sprawled out across the trunk of his fancy car, or maybe if she had screamed, someone would have come and stopped the awful thing that happened next. The worst thing is that Uncle Ted told everyone Jimmy fell off a swing at the park and that he tried to wake him up and then carried him to his car to get help. Carolyn knows it won’t do any good to tell, so she tries to protect Jimmy as best she can after he comes home from the hospital. She never leaves him alone with Uncle Ted, and she coerces Uncle Ted into helping Aunt Jean by threatening him in a way that only he will understand. Carolyn has her own troubles, but she knows they’re nothing compared to Aunt Jean’s: Ted claims ownership of her house and says she’ll have to move out; Jimmy could have surgery to help with his brain injury but there’s no money to pay for it; and she has the great sadness of having lost her older son in the war. Carolyn has a couple of talents. She has a beautiful singing voice (but she’s careful not to let anyone hear her), and she’s a moving public speaker (which she’s not shy about showing off at all). This is a story where good triumphs in the end, even though things can never go back to the way they used to be. Warning:  there is some language that might be considered offensive.  Review by Stacy Church

Listen! by Stephanie S. Tolan

Do you think that it is possible to telepathically communicate with a dog?  Do you think that you can mentally become aware of what your dog is experiencing at a particular moment in time? This amazing book will show you how it can be done!  In Listen! we meet Charley, who is home for the summer recuperating from a car accident.  Her house is on Eagle Lake, where she walks daily to get her strength back and fight her pain.  One day she spots a wild dog in the woods.  Instantly she connects with him, but when she blinks and looks again, the dog has disappeared. Yet the vision of the day stays with Charley.  Over the summer, as she realizes that the dog, who she has named “Coyote,” needs help, Charley works out a plan to rescue him and pursues it fervently.  If you think that Charley’s plans to rescue “Coyote” are too fantastic and impossible to achieve, then read the author’s “EXTRAS” at the end of the book.  Stephanie S. Tolan’s photos of the real “Coyote” and her testimony on how she rescued him verify everything in the beautifully written book Listen!  Review by Trudy Walsh

Sylvie and the Songman by Tim Binding

What a fabulous book!  Chapter One starts with poor Sylvie trying to memorize the famous Willliam Blake poem “Tyger”

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,/In the forest of the night:/What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

“The first lines of the poem seemed straightforward enough, the tiger with his bright shining eyes prowling through the jungle, but she couldn’t get her head round the second half too well.  Immortal hand –what did that mean?  And symmetry? She’d never even heard of the word.  But despite it all, it did make a sort of sense, this fabulous beast with its great rippling body and huge padded paws.”  And speaking of symmetry, the book begins and ends with the tyger/tiger.  Sylvie’s life is on a trajectory to bring her into direct opposition to the Songman, who plans to take over the world and gain dominance over all animals –and eventually humans too –by taking away their voices.  There’s only one animal that’s been able to resist his control, and guess what it is?  The tiger. Sylvie’s father is a composer who also invents bizarre instruments for his compositions: the Furroughla, the Shinglechord, the Featherblow, and one night when Sylvie is helping him practice, something bizarre happens. The instruments sort of take on a life of their own, creating a huge, booming vibration, which causes sort of a seismic shift in the world.  The Songman is instantly aware of what has happened, and the next day he kidnaps Sylvie’s dad to make him tell the secret.  The book is about music –the power of music to transform our lives (just look how the Songman entrances Sylvie by singing her own song to her, the song of her life, that is so sweet that she will give up almost anything to hear it again).  It’s also about animals and how important they are to our lives.  Sylvie loves her old dog, Mr. Jackson, and after a fox (who is actually supposed to help her save the world from the Songman) bites her, she can hear his voice (“seeyoulaterMrJackson seeyoulater Who‘salovelyboythen who’salovelyboy”). This is a classic good vs evil story, and though you can count on good to triumph in the end, there’s plenty of excitement along the way.  Review by Stacy Church

The Crimson Cap by Ellen Howard

I’m not usually a fan of this type of historical fiction, but I found The Crimson Cap really interesting.  I didn’t know anything about the time period (1687) or the setting (LaSalle’s expedition to find the Mississippi River and the route to New France), but I got hooked into the story pretty quickly because Pierre Talon is such a great character.  He is only a boy when he is chosen (because of his ability to learn Native American languages quickly) to accompany LaSalle’s expedition, and he must leave his mother and siblings behind.  He is afraid, but feels a heavy responsibility because his father has run off and left the family to fend for itself.  The settlers are starving, and LaSalle is going to try to find help.  Pierre makes friends with a slightly older boy along the way, and has to contend with some pretty horrible behavior from some of the men on the expedition.  When LaSalle is killed by his own men, and Pierre falls ill, he is taken in by the Hosinai and nursed back to health.  He has to choose several times between the Native Americans who have adopted him and Europeans who haven’t all treated him very well.  The story is realistic, and makes the point that your enemies are those who don’t treat your own people well.  They’re not necessarily good or evil.  Review by Stacy Church

Hannah’s Winter by Kierin Meehan

Hannah’s mother has an irritating habit of speaking in capital letters, which is pretty funny (“Living in Japan will be a WONDERFUL experience for you.”)  Hannah can speak and understand some Japanese from when she lived in Japan as a toddler, but she doesn’t read or write it well, so her mother sees her upcoming trip to Japan to research her next book –Surprising Japanese Gardeners (which Hannah says should be called Surprised Japanese Gardeners because they’d be very surprised after they’d met her and seen her bright purple hair) –as the perfect opportunity for Hannah to learn at least 1,000 kanji.  Hannah is to stay with the Maekawas, who have a daughter, Miki, about her age.  Miki and Hannah turn out to be well matched, especially when it comes to solving the mystery of an ancient riddle that turns up in an antique box that was a gift to Mr. Maekawa.  The riddle leads to some pretty alarming meetings with a ghost/spirit who turns out to be a mischievous boy, and some more alarming meetings with various spirits trying to prevent them from helping the boy, who they nickname “Ocean Boy.” Hannah’s Winter will give you a real sense of Japanese culture, both modern and ancient, and the mystery is fun, too.  Review by Stacy Church

The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. by Kate Messner

Gianna Z. is good at a lot of things: helping her grandmother find where she left her false teeth (in the vegetable crisper), posting the fastest times at cross-country meets, figuring out what dogs people would be if they were dogs (the mean girls at school –pit bull/bloodhound mix), dreaming up really cool art projects.  Unfortunately, she isn’t good at deadlines or schoolwork.  She especially has trouble with big projects with lots of little deadlines.  It doesn’t usually get her down, but now her science grade might stand in the way of her running in the cross-country sectionals, and it doesn’t help that the mean girls break into her gym locker and trash the part of her project she has finished.  As if that’s not bad enough, Gianna’s beloved Nonna seems to be slipping away from her, and her mom is too caught up in her busy schedule to even show up at Nonna’s doctor appointment.   Luckily she has a great best friend, Zig, who seems to always understand what she needs help with.  Oh, and I forgot to mention that Gianna’s dad is a mortician and sometimes has to drop her off at school in the hearse.  Great fodder for the mean girls.  I absolutely love this book.  It’s my favorite combination of funny and sad.  Review by Stacy Church

Mirrorscape by Mike Wilks

Here are the things I like about this book:

1. Great beginning: “It should have been darker than the darkest night, as black as Indian ink.  But it was not.”

2. Lots of (sometimes gory) action, including kidnapping, torture, maiming and murder

3. Wonderful imaginative premise: The world is ruled by five “Mysteries,” each of which has dominion over one of the senses.  For instance, the First Mystery controls the sense of touch and controls the production of cloth and tailoring, among other things.  If someone wants to develop a new type of cloth, they have to pay the First Mystery for something called a “Pleasure.”  The Mysteries, which originally were a way of regulating trade and guaranteeing quality,  have become corrupt, only interested in profit, not value.  Everyone lives in fear of being imprisoned and sent to the mines for running afoul of one of the Mysteries.  The book is all about the Fifth Mystery, which is the most powerful.  It controls the use of color.

4. It’s all about the world of art.  Mel loves to draw more than anything, and apparently he’s very talented at it.  So talented that the most famous artist in the land sends his most trusted minion to get Mel to come be one of his apprentices.  Unfortunately, he lands right in the middle of a lot of intrigue and the aforementioned kidnapping, torture and murder. 

Here are the things I didn’t like so much about the book:

1. Too many battles in the world-within-the-paintings.  At first it was really cool, and the imaginary creatures were fun, but after a while it got tiresome.  It seemed that one struggle would just barely be over and a new one would start. 

Review by Stacy Church

Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper

I love the beginning of this book, where Melody talks about words and how she loves them. It’s not until the end of the first chapter that you find out what words really mean to her: “I have no idea how I untangled the complicated process of words and thought, but it happened quickly and naturally. By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings. But only in my head. I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.” Melody has cerebral palsy. She’s unable to move voluntarily (except for her thumbs), although she sometimes moves in a jerky, spastic way, especially if she’s upset or excited. She can’t really communicate, but there’s plenty going on inside her head. Luckily her parents always believed in her intelligence, and her neighbor Mrs. Valencia, who has been babysitting her since she was born, has pushed her to try and do what she can for herself. School, though, has been terrible up until fifth grade, which is when the story takes place. Now there are some inclusion classes, there’s a special ed teacher who believes her students are capable of learning, and Melody gets her own aide, Christine, a college student. Things really start to look up for her when she gets a computer that can talk for her. Melody is alternately ignored and made fun of at school, and it’s not until the tryouts for the Whiz Kids quiz team that the other kids (and the teacher) are forced to recognize that maybe she isn’t an idiot after all. Melody, with her computer to help her communicate, gets all the questions right. The ending is good, because it’s not too pat. Review by Stacy Church

The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence

The Giant-Slayer is really two stories in one.  The main story tells about a girl growing up in 1955, before the polio vaccine was discovered and many kids were being stricken with the illness.  Because polio affects the muscles of the body, it also affects one’s ability to breathe normally.  The solution in 1955 was to put the afflicted in an “iron lung,” a machine that completely encased the body and worked like a bellows to force air in and out of the patient’s lungs. Laurie is a lonely little girl whose mother is dead and whose father works for the foundation that is raising money to fund polio research. She spends her days with a housekeeper, Mrs. Strawberry, who has old-fashioned ideas about how to keep Laurie from catching polio, which means she isn’t allowed to go anywhere during the summer where other children congregate, especially if there’s water involved.  Laurie has never really had a friend, but then Dickie moves into her neighborhood.  Everything is going great, until Dickie comes down with polio.  Laurie goes to visit him in the polio ward, even though her father and Mrs. Strawberry have forbidden her to.  There are 2 other kids in iron lungs, too, and Dickie convinces her to tell them a story, just like they used to tell each other before he was in the hospital.  So she starts what is the second story in the book.  To be honest, at first I had trouble getting into the giant-slayer story that Laurie tells, but once I could keep the characters straight I enjoyed it.  The style of the writing seems a little young compared to the content, which is pretty sad and upsetting, but I got used to it and ended up really liking the book.  Review by Stacy Church

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

I’m embarrassed to say that I just got around to reading this year’s Newbery winner.  What an unusual book!  I will just tell you that I am not happy with the ending though.  Calpurnia Tate is unlucky enough to be growing up during a time (1899) when young ladies are expected to be interested in all the things that will make them good wives and mothers: cooking, sewing, knitting, darning; and not the things that will make them good scientists: evolution, the natural world, the scientific method and how to distill whiskey from pecans.  Calpurnia is the only girl in a family of 6 boys, and during the summer just before she turns 12, just as she discovers that the grandfather she’s always been so afraid of is a home-grown scientist who welcomes her company and help in his scientific endeavors, her mother decides that it’s time for her to really buckle down and learn the arts of housewifery.  Most of the book moves along happily enough, with entertaining tales of her exploits with her grandfather and funny stories about her brothers, but as I got closer to the end I kept waiting for the moment when Calpurnia would be saved from the life that was expected of her.  She bravely asks her oldest brother if he will help her if she wants to go to university, and asks her grandfather if women can’t be scientists too, but it’s pretty clear that although you, the reader, can hope for a different outcome, it isn’t very likely.  And for a character that I grew so fond of, that’s not a satisfactory ending for me.  Review by Stacy Church

Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur

“It’d been a good three days: crackers and cheese for breakfast, TV; crackers and cheese for lunch, TV; crackers and cheese for dinner, TV, bed. Nothing to think about but TV and cheese. A perfect world. Then I ran out of cheese.”

Like most children in her situation(if books are to be believed), Aubrey covers for her mother after she disappears. She doesn’t tell anyone that she’s all alone, she doesn’t answer the phone, and she doesn’t answer the door. When she runs out of cheese, she takes the money she got for her birthday and goes to the store, buying only the important things, like SpaghettiOs with meatballs, Cheerios, bread, some vegetables, and a pet fish. The aloneness doesn’t last long. Aubrey’s grandmother is worried and comes down to Virginia from Vermont on the train (and she hates to travel!), and when she understands that her daughter Lissie has gone off and left Aubrey alone, she takes her back to Vermont with her while she tries to find her. The story just gets better from here. Aubrey doesn’t want to give in and be happy, but Gram is too good at getting her to cooperate for her to fight it for long. Also, she becomes instant friends with the girl next-door, Bridget. Aubrey bottle up her feelings inside (this may be why she feels sick to her stomach so often) and really only lets them out in letters she writes to her younger sister’ imaginary friend. The author only gradually lets the reader in on the back story –what happened to the rest of Aubrey’s family. In the end, Aubrey has to make a difficult choice: whether to go back to Virginia with her mother, or to stay on in Vermont for a little bit longer. Review by Stacy Church

Back Home by Julia Keller

Back Home is the story of what happens to one girl’s life when her dad returns from the war in Iraq with sever injuries: he’s lost an arm and a leg and suffered a traumatic brain injury.  Rachel is 13, her sister Marcy is 8 and their little brother Rob is 4.  Their mom is the kind of parent who doesn’t keep secrets from her kids, even though she tends to give speeches, “My mother…is one of those people who believes she can get out ahead of things –bad things, I mean –by preparing everybody in advance, by speaking slowly and carefully about the sadness or confusion or frustration you’re about to feel.”  Rachel feels that she can’t ask silly questions like her little sister, but she wonders how much of a person needs to be intact to make you still the same person as before.  At first, her dad doesn’t seem to really be there at all. Not only does he not communicate, but he doesn’t respond to things going on around him.  The hospital said he should be able to do things for himself (like take care of his “personal needs”), but he doesn’t seem to want to.  Then Rachel realizes: “It’s not that Dad didn’t want to do things. It’s that the part of his brain that told him to do things was one of the parts that was injured. So what looked like laziness wasn’t laziness at all. When it looked like he just didn’t care, it wasn’t that he didn’t care. Caring, it turns out, comes from your brain. I know that’s a strange way to think about it, but it’s true: caring comes from your brain. The part of my father that wanted to do things wasn’t there anymore.”  This is a beautifully told story, and even though the ending might not be what you hope it will be, it is certainly realistic. Review by Stacy Church