It Happened: After the Worst Thing Happens by Audrey Vernick

 It is cruel. I wake up.

Tears start before I even form and idea about how I can survive in this life in which not only did my sweet dog die, but it was entirely my fault. 

 His food and water bowls are gone. The leash is no longer hanging on a hook by the mudroom door. The small basket of balls and toys he liked are gone. All the signs of his life are gone.

 Never happened.

Leaving the double-chocolate cupcakes she'd made from her best friend's recipe to cool in the pantry, Army dashes out of the house for dinner at JennaLouise's house, leaving her beloved little white dog Maybe eating his kibble, but when she returns, her dog is already near death. She forgot chocolate is poison to dogs, and little Maybe had eaten six or seven of them. 

 Army is devastated with guilt and misses Maybe terribly. Her friend Jenna and brother Navy try to console her as best the can, and her mom is sympathetic, but already absorbed in the approaching tropical storm. Army's parents run a company which specializes in recovery and restoration of property after storms, fires, and floods. A tropical storm is worsening rapidly and her parents are busy preparing for their cleanup work in its aftermath.

No one has time to share her grief. Walking alone through her neighborhood, Army notices a small girl, about five years old, sitting on the second floor roof of the house into which new neighbors have just moved. She feels compelled to tell the new neighbors about the child, and discovers an distraught mother  alone with newborn twins. Army offers to climb out the window and sit with Madison until her mother can get the twins settled. She sits silently with her until the little girl decides to climb back inside. She learns then that Madison is mute and autistic and prone to climbing anything--utility towers and tall trees.

 And then, when Army is forced to wait through a Cub Scout meeting with her little brother Navy, their program is about service dogs, and suddenly Army decides that she must find a way to get a service dog for Madison to help keep her safe. Surprisingly, Navy gives her a box he's rescued from the trash, with all of Maybe's toys, his leash, and bowls. And when her mother finds the box in her closet, she doesn't understand.

"You have to forgive yourself, honey," her mom says.

"I don't know how." I say. "Because I can't do your Never Happened thing--act like there never was a Maybe."

Mom takes her time. "I work with people going through awful things, some because of human error. But those were just things. You have your memories and I knew it would be easier to get over it without all the reminders around."

"For you," I say. "That's what's easier for you. For me, it helps to have the actual thing that's part of the memory.

The things have meaning to me."

And her mother gets it that things can help in handling grief, and with the help of her best friend and the annoying Elsie Jennings, who  insists on befriending her, Army sets out to find a way to get a service dog for Madison and finds her own self-forgiveness in the aftermath of the storm, in Audrey Vernick's newest middle grade novel, After the Worst Thing Happens (Mary Ferguson Books, 2020).

Author Audrey Verdick is capable of penning hilarious picture books for young primary students (cf. her First Grade Dropout) (see review here), but in this realistic first-person coming-of-age story, the real focus is on Army's relationship with her stoic mother and father whose business is to remove all evidence of unfortunate events, an understanding of her mom who learned to hide grief after her father's early death, and a consciousness that she must handle loss and guilt in her own way. Kirkus Reviews says, "This exploration of family dynamics is where this novel shines."

Dog, Gone: Where Lily Isn't by Julie Paschkis

Lily ran,

and wiggled,

and wagged,

but not now.

The loss of a beloved being is hard, whether a pet or a person.

Lily's not there on the little rug beside the girl's bed in the morning. She's not there begging at breakfast. She's not there to bark when someone comes to the door or to pull every which way but the right way on the leash, or to bark a happy welcome after school.

The house is full of all the places where Lily isn't.

Where is Lily?

The loss of a pet is usually the first loss children know, and it takes time to realize that they still live in memory and in the heart, in the Caldecott-winning author Julie Paschkis' new picture book, Where Lily Isn't (Henry Holt and Company, 2020).

Loss of something or someone loved is hard, but a part of life that comes sooner or later to everyone. Artist Paschkis has her little girl keep the memory of her pet close by drawing pictures that keep her beloved dog in her heart. Others may have different ways, and reading books like this one is a way children can learn to deal with personal loss. Margaret Chodos-Irvine adds comforting illustrations, both of Lily's presence in memory and of her loss. Says Kirkus in a starred review, "Understated but powerful . . . with a sweet, unforgettable ending."

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).

The Girl Can't Help It! The Calculus of Change by Jessie Hilb

I have a secret passion for calculus. I like the idea of infinitesimal change, because it feels like somehow I can control it. I am in charge of getting the numbers and symbols where they need to go. What I can't control in real life is the sudden, catastrophic change that often comes without steps or warning and makes life insufferably different. Like a dead mom.

But it is in real life, in calculus class, that Aden is hit by a change she can't control.

A boy named Tate asks her to tutor him. Looking at him is like a shot out of the blue.

Talking to Tate is like swimming underwater. Everything silences, and it's just him and me. But I can't breathe.

He smiles. I'm toast.

The air seems electric when she's with him. They laugh together. They finish sentences together. They seem to sparkle together.

But Tate has a steady girlfriend, Maggie. Aden tries to forget about her and savor every moment she has with Tate. But she admits to herself that she is jealous of Maggie, thin and stylish in her skinny jeans, while Aden feels like a bubble in her long skirts and tunics. "Can a girl be pretty if she's also fat?" she wonders.

But times with Tate are like out-of-body experiences for Aden. He makes her feel beautiful. She lives for those times when they are together.

The rest of life seems a slow slog. Her younger brother Jon is restless, unhappy with her father's plan for him to win a lacrosse scholarship and confesses to Aden that he wants to go to Rhode Island School of Design and create video games. Her dad tries to keep the family together, but he is often irrationally angry, especially with Jon. And then her best friend Marissa confides that she thinks she's in love with one of their teachers.

"Lance? Lance who?"

"Lance Danson." she says, still looking down.

"Wait, what? As in Mr. Danson? "He's married. He has a kid! Dude," I say, "be careful there."

"I can't help it," Marissa says quietly.

Suddenly Aden is struck with the unsuspected similarity between them. Tate has a steady girlfriend, and yet, she can't help the way she feels around him, either.

Love does not follow the rules. There's no certainty about it.

Is attraction as quixotic as Cupid's arrow? Or can it be subject to rational calculation? Little Richard's classic song says "She can't help it, the girl can't help it." But Aden is the Queen of calculus class. She likes scenarios she can control. But she can't control the fact that her mother has been dead since she was seven. She can't help her brother Jon, who seems rudderless, diverted by drugs and his girlfriend, even though she's always been his substitute mom. She can't seem to get through to her dad, who seems to be sinking into unresolved grief and rage. And finally, her own self doubt gets in the way of logic. She feels she wants and deserves more from Tate, but if she doesn't get it, can she bear to turn away from him? She begins to do irrational things that make her wonder.

Jessie Hilb's The Calculus of Change (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2018) takes on the messy improbability of love and life, the things that can be controlled and the things that cannot, the things that can be helped and the things that cannot, in an absorbing story of young love and mature love lost and found, and hoped for that almost sinks her main character beneath the waters of her first love. No absolute answers are offered, except to keep swimming, to give it your best stroke, as Aden does in a book that will resonate strongly with young adult readers.

Not In Our Stars: Lost Stars by Lisa Selin Davis

I looked toward the darkening sky. I watched as the moon and sun collided, a black spot surrounded by a thin band of fire, and in that magical instant I could feel Ginny around me. Matter is always matter. Every molecule that made up her person was still here, or at least in our galaxy.... Nothing mattered here on Earth. Nothing mattered but the stars, my real friends, the source of all life.

In that moment, that seven minutes and thirty one seconds of eclipse, I felt completely at peace. There was no life or death, and Ginny had never existed and always would. All the answers were in the stars, and I loved them as much as I'd ever loved anyone.

When the family's golden girl, her older sister Ginny, died in a drunken crash in her junior year, Carrie's family falls apart. Little sister Rosie becomes the perfect little sister, her mother flees to a semi-Buddhist "retreat for lost souls," as Carrie puts it, and her father goes autocratic, trying to crack down on Carrie, hoping to save her from Ginny's fate.

Carrie's only lifelines are her love for astronomy and her sister's older friends, just graduated and spending their last summer at home before college trying to pack as much booze and drugs and thoughtless sex as they can into their last days as teenagers. Carrie knows she doesn't really fit in, that they accept her out of loyalty to her dead sister, but she clings to those nights in Soo's basement with music and drinking to dull her grief and secret responsibility for her sister's death, and she numbs her emotions by relentlessly calculating the progress of Comet 11P/A Alexandrov, making its appearance in its 97-year cycle at the end of the summer.

And then two people come in to her life. Tonya was a friend from freshman year, before Ginny died. Her dad has enrolled Carrie in what she considers boot camp for bad teens, a community work camp constructing a footbridge to the town observatory, and Tonya, grown into a no-nonsense straw-boss type, tries to shape Carrie up, to teach her how to pull weeds, use a shovel and hammer, and be a responsible person.

The other new person is Dean. For reasons unspoken, he is staying for the summer with his aunt next door, and the sound of his guitar draws Carrie to him, first in conversations about music, and then deeper and deeper into friendship and the beginning of her first real feelings for a boy. Somehow, Dean seems to understand her fear of getting close to anyone, and when Comet Vira becomes visible over the horizon, something inside of Carrie begins to change. She takes heart in knowing that the light of those already dead "lost stars" keeps coming toward earth, eons after their death.

"Eventually every star will explode. There's no getting around it," I said.

"Look," Dean said, "we're all going to die or a black hole will swallow us. But it might be tens of thousands of years, millions, before then. Or, as that book you like says, 'billions.'"

"Billions," I said.

"Nobody in the whole universe knows how things will end," Dean said.

Lisa Selin Davis' forthcoming Lost Stars (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is a young adult novel that catches its character at a point of celestial transit, a moment when nothing and yet everything changes. She sees her parents as planets in their own orbits and yet subject to the same pull from the stars that she feels, and she sees her own path through time in a different light. Like her comet, Carrie realizes that she has her own path to follow, not one set in the stars.

Playing out against the background music of the 1980s, this honest but hopeful novel deals without apology with the time in which drugs disrupted families and brought young people to face deaths of their own doing, a time like all times when they must find their own stars to steer by, but find they don't have to do it alone.

Pippi Returns! When Mischief Came to Town by Katrina Nannestad

Here I am, feeling sorry for myself.

I'm sitting on a wooden crate, wedged between a cage of geese and a goat. If I press too hard against the geese, they honk and peck at me, which makes me want to cry. If I press to hard against the goat, she eats my plaits. One is already two centimeters shorter than the other, and that makes me want to cry.

"I will be a brave girl," I whisper. "I will make Mama proud of me."

Ten-year-old Inge Maria Jensen has just seen her mother buried. With no father or family in Copenhagen, she finds herself shipped off to a grandmother she has never known, to Bornholm, a windy, gray island where her Grandmother greets her goat-gnawed hair with a critical eye. No hugs or smiles are offered, and when Inge Maria points to a snowflake, surprisingly drifting through the doorway into Grandmother's cottage, she gets a hard slap across the hand.

Inge's life with Mama in Copenhagen was filled with lights and music and games and love, but her mother's mother seems to have taken a dislike to her instantly. But Grandmother's soup is delicious, although Inge is still hungry when the bowl is empty. Then Grandmother puts out bread and butter and jam. Is she allowed to take some? Or will she earn another slap? At last, her hunger overcomes her fear and she begins to eat the bread.

By the time she sits down with a cup of tea and a glass of milk for me, I have gobbled all three pieces of bread. "Thank you, Grandmother." I say.

"Good girl!" she says. "I never could abide a fussy eater."

Things look better the next day when Grandmother quickly knits Inge Maria a bright red wool cap with an enormous pom-pom on top to make up for her missing braid and introduces her to the animals in the barn--the honey-colored milk cows Blossom and Hilda, Levi the donkey, Plenty the pig, and especially an enormous tom turkey named Henry with a talent for clowning. Grandmother's oatmeal and hot cocoa have generous splashes of cream, she doesn't object to Inge's one-eared stuffed rabbit, and she seems to enjoy her reading aloud from her book of Andersen's Fairy Tales. She takes her to visit her old friends Angelina Nordstrup and the Pedersen twins, whose conversations are very boring but whose baked goods are delicious and who interestingly call Grandmother "Dizzy." Grandmother won't say why.

At first school is disappointing. There are no funny songs to sing, and they all have to draw the same thing at the same time and with the same four colors. And worst of all, at recess girls are made to sit quietly on a bench while the boys get to run and play games on the grassy field.

But little by little, Inge Maria introduces new songs to her class, even making up new ones, and persuades the schoolmaster to let girls run and play as they do in Copenhagen. She coaxes laughs and the telling of old girlhood stories out of Grandmother's old friends and learns that she was nicknamed "Dizzy" because she loved to dance and sing and play crazy pranks when she was a girl, just like Inge. Her stodgy Grandmother, also lost in grief for her own daughter, becomes warm and affectionate, and laughter comes often to their cozy cottage when Inge Maria brings home a gray kitten Grandmother names Fleabag. And so it seems that smiles come to perhaps to the whole stolid citizenry of Bornholm. And at last Inge is able to weep for the loss of her mother, a loss she now knows Grandmother shares.

Grandmother hugs me close. "It is hard when people go away." she says softly.

I sob, and Grandmother whispers, "It's okay to be sad because it means that we are blessed. Blessed to have loved someone so much and to have had them as part of our lives."

Katrina Nannestad's just published When Mischief Came to Town (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), set in 1911, is an old fashioned story of the best sort, with a high-spirited and adventurous heroine reminiscent of Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn and Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking (Puffin Modern Classics), one who takes on life with open arms and open heart. Nannestad's new middle grade novel has received high praise and starred reviews all around, recommended as a first purchase for all children's libraries. (It's going straight to my nine-year-old granddaughter right away.)

Going Back: I'll Always Be With You by Violetta Armour

"Mom, you can't be serious. Indiana? What are you thinking? Not about me, obviously."

"Teddy, you've hardly left the house all summer.-A fresh start might be good for us--with not so many memories."

"How can moving to Dad's old house, probably sleeping in his old room, be fresh? Oh, sure, no reminders of him there."

"But those are positive things. It's hard to avoid the negatives here. Like that intersection."

Our dog, Winnie, starts whimpering. "Are you going to get rid of him, too?" I blurt, and then I wish I could take it back.

Then it's like she never heard me and she goes into Mom mode. The cost of living. It's cheaper in Indiana. Need to save the insurance money for college. Like a degree from that Podunk school would get me into a decent college. I walk away.

I killed my dad and now my mom is killing me.

But everything in Phoenix reminds Mary Kostoff of her husband Stan and his death, at an intersection by a drunk driver, in a car driven by her teenaged son Teddy out for a lesson. It seems to make sense to move in with Stan's widowed mother, Buba, lonely alone in her big house in a peaceful small town. The two little girls adapt right away to having their affectionate and lively grandmother around, but Teddy is still angry, taken away from his high school where he has just made the varsity basketball team and has many friends.

Now Teddy starts his much-anticipated junior year at Middleburg High School, sharing a locker with Mindy, a quirky, talkative girl with bright orange hair and aquamarine braces on her teeth, and having to be the new kid in a high school where everyone has known each other since toddler days. To make things worse, the varsity coach has plenty of skilled seniors and Teddy has to go back to playing junior varsity basketball. But Mindy's constant fountain of little-known facts keeps him laughing, and his junior varsity coach, Luther Stone, an energetic young black man, sees Teddy's skills and makes him team captain.

Mary, too, misses her old friends, and on a whim applies for a book store job and finds it very satisfying. She offers to start an evening book club, and at her first session meets Rosetta, a striking and stylish African American woman, and the two find themselves drawn to each other. Rosetta is empathetic, telling how her family moved with other black people from Chicago to live in a brand-new subdivision for employees of a new plant in Middleburg. She tells Mary how she made new friends and even became a cheerleader, thanks to her gymnastics classes in Chicago. As they meet for coffee often, Mary discovers that Rosetta was a senior the same year as her husband and is eager to hear what she remembers of Stan in high school. Rosetta brings along her 1968 annual, with pictures of her and Stan and their classmates, and mentions that her grown son Luther is the assistant basketball coach at the high school

With Teddy seeming happier, with a new friend and a job she loves, Mary begins to feel that she is fitting into life in the small Midwestern town--until she goes to Teddy's first basketball game. Looking at Teddy talking with Coach Luther Stone, she sees something she never expected.

She has to talk to Rosetta.

Mary takes a deep breath. "Okay. It's Luther. He reminds me so much of Stan. And when I went to thank him for being so nice to Teddy...up close.... His hazel eyes. The cleft in his chin. It's Stan all over again. And even his mannerisms. That half smile. I know, my counselor said I would keep seeing Stan in so many people....

Rosetta closes her eyes and when she opens them there are tears.

"You're not imagining things, Mary. Luther is Stan's son."

"The past is never dead. In fact, it isn't even past," goes William Faulkner's famous saying, and although at first Mary is angry that Rosetta was drawn to her to learn how Stan's later life went, she realizes that she was doing the same thing with Rosetta, mining her memories for bits and pieces of the young Stan. The two women understand that they were never rivals in their love for the same man at different times in his life and that through him they have the promise of a family connection that offers much more.

In her I'll Always Be with You (iUniverse, 2015), Violetta Armour tells her story through the multiple voices of Teddy, Mary, Rosetta, and with flashback narrations from the seventeen-year-old Stan and Rosetta, and although she populates the novel with other well-drawn characters, her best writing is of the two women who find their lives interwoven by events they could never have expected, of past love and loss, grief, and new life found. Kirkus Reviews sums it up: "The threads of a dead man's life and history converge in Armour's dramatic debut novel about heritage, family, and forgiveness."

Sometimes Things Just Happen: The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

RESULTS

Summarize your observations. Do your outcomes support your hypothesis? Remember, science never "proves" anything; it merely contributes to the growing body of evidence. If your research does not support your hypothesis, be honest about that. Remember that in science we learn as much from failures as we do from successes.                                                                                                                         --Mrs. Turton

Suzy and Franny had been best friends since they were five, at their first swimming lesson, when Franny swam underwater across the pool to where the instructor was urging the little girls to blow bubbles in the water. Suzy followed her and they became friends.

Until middle school happens. Suddenly Franny is drawn to the pretty popular girls who ignore Suzy. Suzy feels invisible, her words unheard amid the chatter of clothes and trips to the mall, and her friend drifts inexorably away. Suzy can't understand what is happening, and at last she plays a cruel prank on her friend, one that she hopes will make Franny understand how she feels, but Franny never links Suzy to the deed, and by the end of school, Suzy feels herself becoming a silent loner adrift in a strange world.

And then, at the end of summer, just before school starts, Suzy's mother tells her that Franny is dead, drowned swimming in the ocean with her family. And Suzy cannot accept that things like that just happen.

Zu, my mom had said, sometimes things just happen. It was a terrible answer, the very worst.

Mrs. Turton says when something happens that no one can explain, it means you have bumped up against the edge of human knowledge. And that is when you need science.

As the new school year begins, Suzy falls into a deliberate not-talking silence. Then on a field trip to an aquarium, she slips away from her giggling classmates, flicking water from the shark touch tank at each other, and finds the Jellies exhibit where she is drawn to a sign that reads An Invisible Enigma. The placard describes the deadly Irukandji jellyfish, and its words strike Suzy with what must be the explanation for Franny's unexplained death.

There are a number of documented deaths from Irukandji syndrome. Stings may have been the true cause of deaths mistakenly attributed to other causes. Many researchers believe the Irukandji has migrated far beyond its native Australia as the oceans warm.

Obsessed with proving her hypothesis, Suzy uses a research project for Mrs. Turton's science class as a cover to gather information, googling for experts on the Irukandji, settling upon one kind-looking professor in Australia, Dr. Jamie Seymour, who himself almost died from a jellyfish sting. She even places a call to his office, but when he comes to the phone, Zu is unable to speak to him.

Zu's compulsion grows, believing that if she can speak to Jamie Seymour face-to-face, he will understand and help her prove the cause of her friend's death. As the year goes on, she starts to prepare.  She opens her piggy bank, saves her allowance, copies her father's credit card, and even takes money from her mother and brother. She finds limo services in Australia to take her to Jamie's campus and makes reservations at a hotel nearby. She secretly locates her passport, packs her bag, and books a flight online with no questions asked.

Here's the most important thing I've learned from not-talking. It is much, much easier to keep a secret when you don't use any words at all.

But despite her methodical preparation, as Zu picks up her boarding pass at the airline desk she learns something she didn't foresee.

The ticket agent asks for her visa. She doesn't have one.

"Sweetie, where are your parents?"

"Passengers ages twelve and over may travel with no adult supervision as long as they have a valid boarding pass," I quoted.

"No," she said. "Not international travel,"

I had failed.

As people grow, unpredicted things happen. In Ali Benjamin's The Thing About Jellyfish (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), Suzy discovers that a hypothesis that works in one environment may not work in another. Her belief that Franny would always be there as a friend has failed. But as Mrs. Turton's scientific method says, we learn as much from failures as we do from successes, and that is the premise of Benjamin's intense coming of age novel,  that we swim in uncharted waters in which there may be no final conclusion, only better hypotheses as we go. With her central symbol of the jellyfish, a nearly invisible, shape-changing chimera, yet real, pulsating like a beating heart but potentially deadly to other hearts, the author catches the vision of the only partly knowable world into which a child grows up.. Suzy's internal world and the external world of family and school flow separate but parallel paths part of the way, as she bravely tries to find how to find the connection to make it all come together again.

"We never step into the same river twice," goes the familiar quote, and that river of time, life and death, and even of science is and is not the same every time we step into it. Ali Stevenson's beautifully crafted coming-of-age novel, moving back and forth through Suzy's year, following the steps of the scientific method offered by her teacher, shows her character moving on, ready to step back into that river. Widely praised by critics and currently long-listed for the National Book Award, this is a novel readers will not forget.

'Tis the Blight that Man Was Born For: The Question of Miracles by Elana K. Arnold

Back home in California, no one ever ate lunch indoors--lunchtime was a strictly outdoor activity. It was humane. There was room to breathe.

But that was back home. Here in Oregon, where it had rained literally every day since they'd parked the moving van, school lunch had to be consumed indoors.

It was another reason to hate it here. As if Iris didn't have a long enough list already.

And there was Sarah's ghost.

Iris's best friend Sarah had been killed back in California that summer, leaving the tennis courts, struck by a careening car that just missed Iris and hit Sarah right beside her. Sarah had always been her other half, the person with whom she shared everything, and Iris longs for her friend, who seems, not gone at all, but somehow just beyond her reach. The "fresh start" in Corvallis, with its interminable gray drizzle, the change that her parents hoped would help, wasn't working.

The new life is nothing like her old life, surrounded by friends. People in the middle school cafeteria stare at her standing with her tray in the middle of room alone, so Iris accepts the offer of a strange-looking boy with wild curly hair to sit with him at an empty table. Boris is clearly not one of the popular kids. His social skills reveal no concept of personal space, chewing and at the same time garrulously talking on and on about some game while Iris sits, gaze averted. But Boris is cheerful and invites her over to his house, and Iris reluctantly agrees, mostly from a lack of other options.

But Boris soon tells her his story. He survived to be born by what his parents feel was a real miracle, an internal deformity correcting itself as a group of nuns prayed to Pope John Paul, and he tells her that he'll soon be visited by a team from the Vatican, sent to determine if a miracle had actually occurred with his birth,

Iris is startled. If a doomed baby can be restored to health, perhaps a miracle which will allow her to reach Sarah's ghost could happen for her. Iris somehow comes to believe that Sarah's spirit is in their storage closet with her tennis racket, the one she was holding when she died. Secretly Iris visits the town psychic, and even agrees to search of traces of Sarah's spirit with Boris' audio equipment. On Sarah's birthday, Iris buys a copy of Anne of Green Gables, wraps it lovingly, and hides it in the closet behind the racket for Sarah. Then one night she hears a strange sound from downstairs.

Whatever it was, came from beneath her, not above.

Iris blinked into the hallway's darkness and felt her way to the banister, then down the steep staircase.

On the sixteenth step, Iris stopped. At last she heard the sound--it was a lament, a wail, a beseeching prayer.

It came from the the closet under the stairs.

"Sarah?" she whispered. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight.

"Sarah, is that you?"

Iris closed her eyes and prayed. Give me a miracle.

Iris does not find the miracle she wants, but as time passes she begins to see that all of life is its own miracle, in Elana K. Arnold's just published The Question of Miracles (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Dealing with deep grief is a difficult subject, especially for middle readers just beginning to deal with mortality--mortality of friends, parents, and finally everyone around them. Arnold's sensitive narrative builds tension as Iris comes closer to understanding her own loss and finding a way to find joy in life despite her grief. The chilly gray rain brings new life from the garden Iris and her dad plant in early spring, and Iris begins to heal from her loss, even as she struggles with the eternal question of why some live and some die. With its difficult theme, this is perhaps not a book for everyone, but there are few young readers who won't benefit from Arnold's gentle story of the passage through grief to life.