The Big Who Knows: Right As Rain by Lindsey Stoddard

I like my bed because it has two inches of foam that remembers my body.

And then, there's my last memory of him, shaking me awake, whispering. "Hey, sleepyhead." Locking pinkies.

Maybe it won't be so bad to leave the bed behind.

"This way we'll start fresh...." Mom says.

With the grief for the loss of her big brother Guthrie, Rain's parents seem to exist in two separate worlds. Her mom hustles about, always rushing off to the next thing. Her dad withdraws to his bed and bedroom, sleeping in his clothes, barely speaking. And Rain knows it is all her fault.

Her mom decides they need a fresh start in a new place, and Rain finds her family leaving their comfortable house in Vermont, her school and best friend Izzy, and moving to a small apartment in New York City, where a lot of people speak Spanish and the school has no library. Her dad is still hiding behind a closed door, her mom is still busying about, and the sixth-grade girl in her building and in her new class seems already to have a grudge against her.

Rain sees the future as a Big Who Knows.

But her teacher is kind and her classroom library has a copy of The One and Only Ivan, the book she had to return unfinished in her old school, and Rain finds that she and Frankie share a passion for running.

I stretch long and gain half a stride on Frankie, but she crosses the line first and pumps her fist toward the sky. I finish just behind her but ahead of the footsteps that chased me the whole way.

"G-g-good race." I look back and see little wispy, tiny, stuttering Amelia. She smiles."Th-th-third place!" she says.

Frankie saunters over and puts up a hand for a high five, and Amelia and I go for it at the same time so our hands all kind of meet.

Frankie reluctantly invites her to join the relay team for the middle-school meet in a few weeks. Together Rain and Frankie recruit classmates Amelia, whose stutter keeps her from speaking to almost everyone, and little Ana, both small but fast runners.

But there is more to be done than just winning a race for Rain.

In books the parents get back together, and it's never the kid's fault if they don't.

But I can't forget that night, and how it is my fault....

Like Ivan, Rain still feels like the one and only, alone with a secret she can't tell her parents. But a lot happens in a few weeks as Rain discovers others dealing with their own loss. Grief after the death of a family member is hard, but Rain and her parents do find a fresh start in a very different place, in Lindsay Stoddard's Right as Rain (Harper, 2019), in which Rain and her parents each find some solace in involvement in their new urban community and in sharing their own guilt and loss at last. Rain is a strong character, revealing her feelings through Stoddard's sensitively written text and the poems she and her reluctant classmate poets share, and helping to build a new family relationship in the Big Who Knows ahead. Says School Library Journal, "This touching middle grade novel addresses the heartache of loss while also providing an insightful, accessible introduction to privilege, homelessness, and gentrification. Honest, gut-wrenching, and hopeful, this is a story about letting people in and discovering you’re a part of something larger.”

Lindsay Stoddard's first book was Just Like Jackie (Harper, 2018).