This book really hit home. I mean, it was one long ugly cry.
It opens with 12-year-old Merci's Lolo, or grandfather, who's being escorted home in a police cruiser after he mistook the wrong child at the elementary school for his own and tries to haul him home.
To an adult reader, the event clearly speaks to Lolo's growing dementia, which in the book is confirmed as Alzheimer's. Over the course of the story, Merci is left alone with her Lolo to care for him and wonder what is going on, why he's changing so much -- becoming angry, violent even, toward her and her grandmother. Add to that the challenges of middle school, and finding her place with new friends and old, and it's a heart-wrenching read.
It's not until the very end that Merci learns of her Lolo's diagnosis, and that her time with him is preciously fleeting, if not already gone.
