#tbt: A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass

Image: Little, Brown

Happy Thursday! The weather around here has been crazy extremes. It got so hot last week that all the flowering trees burst into bloom and almost immediately faded. This week it's cold. Oh, and my refrigerator broke. It's seven years old and its fancy computer had problems the company couldn't fix from the beginning. Okay, I can live without the computer connecting to the network to tell me the weather, but I need the my food to stay cool enough not to spoil. I'm having trouble getting a repairman because the brand is apparently notoriously difficult to repair. Ugh! My last fridge lasted 30 years without a problem.

#tbt features A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass, who recently posted about it turning twenty! Thirteen-year-old Mia has a secret. She has synethesia and as a synethete, she sees things that no one else sees. She sees the world in colors and shapes. Her beloved cat, for instance, is a mango cloud. This has been an easy secret to keep until she hits algebra and foreign language. Her colors don't translate here. Also, things are not great with her best friend and her brother constantly puts her down.

When it published in 2003, I was working in a different school library. I book talked the title and a student exclaimed, "That's what I have! Can I read this?" She was so thrilled to see herself in a novel and her classmates and friends got to understand her a bit better as well - mirrors and windows.

A Mango-Shaped Space won The Schneider Family Book Award and is a TMS favorite, as most of her books are.