Middle Grade Monday: Seven Clues to Home by Gae Polisher and Nora Raleigh Baskin

Image:  

Seven Clues to Home by Gae Polisner and Nora Raleigh Baskin. 198 p. Alfred A. Knopf/ Random House Children's Books, June, 2020. 9780593119617. (Review of finished, purchased copy.)

Happy Monday! Today's rainy morning was perfect for hunkering down and reading! I had appointments earlier, but brought my current book with me for the waiting rooms. We had a run of beautiful weather here in northern NJ, so the rain was good. I forgot to shut the sprinkler off though.

Middle Grade Monday features Seven Clues to Home by Gae Polisner and Nora Raleigh Baskin. I learned about this book on a Twitter discussion about books that released during the pandemic, but didn't get the marketing they deserved despite good reviews, and thus, didn't do that well. I hadn't heard about it and am a fan of both authors! 

Joy and Lukas became bffs way back in second grade when Joy discovered that they both had summer birthdays within days of each other. She asked, "What are the odds of that?" Lukas endearingly tries to figure it out. He's a math guy. From that point on, they always celebrated together with a scavenger hunt to their gifts. But Joy is dreading the approach of her thirteenth birthday because it marks the first anniversary of Lukas' death. She has been grieving deeply for the past year and never did open the envelop he left at her house as her first clue. She decides to open it and set out on a belated scavenger hunt.

The nonlinear story shifts from the previous year to the present and POV shifts from the present day, present tense narration by Joy to Lukas' story of how he planned the gift and the hunt. They both reflect on their growing closeness and the fear that it might ruin their friendship if the other doesn't reciprocate. The story is moving and emotionally intense and perfect for middle school readers who love sad, sad books like Suzanne LaFleur's Eight Keys or Wendy Mass' Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life.

There was one nit that pulled me out of the story, but no tween reader will notice, nor will many adults, since most drive cars with automatic transmission. (I suppose not many who work in publishing even drives a car.) "The tires grind over the gravel; she steps on the clutch, flips the shifter into park, and shuts the engine." (p.107) As someone who has driven manual vehicles most of my adult life and whose four sons all learned on manual transmission (very painful with lots of rage, but gratitude now), let me just say, there is no park. You shift the car into first gear and put on the emergency brake. It pulled me right out of the story and made me wonder why that little detail of a clutch was even there. The sentence works without it. Again, small nit that most won't notice.