Tough Moves: I Smell Like Ham by Betty Hicks

Still grieving for his mother's death, middle-schooler Nick Kimble throws himself into trying out for the sixth-grade basketball team, a feat which is not made easy by his friend Carson, who always manages to steal the ball when he drives. Still, things are not so bad. Nick gets along with his dad just fine and manages to hold his own with his edgy friends, who are always willing to tease anyone who's vulnerable.

Then Nick's dad remarries and things get touchy at home, too. His new stepmother is all right, and she seems like a good cook until she veers into tofu and something that sounds like "porta-potty burgers." Then, to complicate his social life, she buys organic clove shampoo that makes Nick's hair smell like a glazed ham. But the biggest problem is her dorky, nerdy, wimpy eight-year-old son, Dwayne. It's embarrassing enough when Nick is forced to take Duh-wayne out on Halloween, but when Carson dares the group to smoke cigarettes in his tree house, poor Dwayne pukes all over Nick, and Nick has to suffer through the next day with jokes like "What's up, Chuck?"

But when Carson is grounded for his Halloween pranks, Nick gets the chance to start their team's next game in his place. With his usual bad timing, Dwayne picks that day to run away, and when he figures out where he must be hiding, Nick has to cut the big game to go out and find him. Nick learns that juggling family and team responsibilities is a new version of ball handling harder than he could have imagined.

Betty Hicks finds the right balance of Nick's inner life and his school persona in I Smell Like Ham. Despite its frequent laughs and easy-going guy banter, this is a serious book about learning how to live in a blended family and learning how to make it through the trials of early adolescence.

Family Secrets: Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It by Sundee Frazier

A kid with a scientific mind--even while doing his chores--Brendan Buckley begins to wonder about dust.

"I stopped thinking about Khalfani and riding my bike, and even Grampa Clem. And I definitely wasn’t thinking about finishing any chore. I went straight to my computer and got on the Internet, where I typed in the search question “What is dust?”

Sixty-seven million, nine hundred thousand results came up.

I had no idea there would be so much out there about dust, but that’s the thing about asking questions: They often lead to surprises, and they always lead to more questions."

Still sad over his Grampa Clem's death, ten-year-old Brendan's questions about the science of rocks and minerals lead him to investigate an exhibit at the mall. As it often does in science and in life, serendipity takes a hand and leads him to the display of Ed DuBose, president of the local rockhounds' club, and Brendan suddenly realizes that Ed is the white grandfather his mother will never talk about. With a white mom and black father, Brendan has never really given serious thought to being biracial, but he has always wondered what happened to his mom's father, whom she will only say is "gone."

Feeling the loss of his other grandfather, Brendan is drawn to this gruff old man who shares his prominent ears and his love for mineralogy, and without telling his mother, he resolves to visit Ed and find some answers to his family's long estrangement. What he finds, like his Google search on dust, turns up some surprises which Brendan has to accept and many questions which he has to find the courage to ask his new found grandfather and his own mother.

Biracial children, living as they do on the cusp of our racial ambiguities, often live with questions that the rest of us would rather leave unspoken. Brendan's honest attempts to get at the heart of his severed family's secrets pulls no punches with the reader as piece by piece he puts together the evidence he needs. In human relations as well as in science there are often variables. Brendan learns that his mother has never forgiven her father for cutting off all contact, even with her own dying mother, but he also senses that Ed, who teaches him about driving and takes him on an expedition to find "Thunder Eggs," deeply regrets his separation from his daughter and grandson.

"What am I?" Brendan writes in his "Book of Big Questions," and in Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It, the summer before sixth grade is one in which Brendan learns about much more than rock science.