This is a lower middle grade read about a 5th grade girl, Mika, for whom life just doesn't work out the way she expects.
Fifth grade -- and the start of middle school -- is not at all what she expects. There's poetry in science class, the art teacher declares no drawing (??!) and is only allowing the use of found objects, and math class has an unconventional math teacher, Mr. Vann, who skips around in the text and asks his students to keep a journal and draw (!!) out their problem solutions. Not that she's complaining about the last bit, because Mika loves to draw.
But things don't go as she expects at home, either. Mika's mom throws her a curveball when she's diagnosed with cancer and doesn't respond to the treatments the way they'd hoped.
The story is accompanied by pages of Mika's drawings in her math journal, showing her attempts to puzzle through her math problems, which inevitably relate to her Mom's cancer issues.
One of the things I liked about the story, overall, is that Mika doesn't really have a story "goal," not in the sense of a heroine on a quest or with a task to complete to save the world or all of humanity. Things just don't work out the way she predicts or expects they will -- pretty much all the time. Even math is no help in predicting anything about her mom's cancer, although it is ironically full of numbers. And yet, math journaling is the key way she copes with her mother's health struggles.
And ultimately, it's how Mika copes during this tumultuous year that's the important life-lesson. I think we sometimes forget kids want to see themselves in the stories they read, and 10- & 11-year-olds don't always have "goals." Instead, life just sort of happens around them and to them, and they feel powerless and thrust into circumstances that force them to react, to cope, to deal.
Mika shows how something she never expected helps her to do just that -- and that's the poignant message to readers that resonates.
Enjoy!
