by Holly Goldberg Sloan, 380 pages, Grades 6 and up
Willow Chance is a genius. She meets a girl from Vietnam and spends the next 7 days studying Vietnamese. She learns 85 phrases in addition to a number of verbs and their conjugations. Besides languages Willow also enjoys studying medical conditions and plants, but she has at twelve she has already had a pretty hard life. She has been orphaned, adopted, she has had problems in school – she has trouble making small talk and therefore making friends, and she is just about to start a new school which promises to be a challenge. That seems like enough, but besides all that her adoptive parents who love her and she loves so much suddenly die in a car accident. Willow, who likes to know how everything is going to work, finds herself in a place completely out of her control; it is the first time in her life that even counting by 7s has not helped her feel better.
If you enjoy books about kids in unusual circumstances you might also like: Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine, or Waiting for Normal, by Leslie Connor, or Guitar Boy, by M.J. Auch.
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Tags: death, family problems, friendship, realistic fiction
