Sometimes, home isn’t where you expect to find it.

After losing his mom in a fatal car crash, Kaede Hirano–now living with a grandfather who is more stranger than family–developed anger issues and spent his last year of middle school acting out.

Best-friendless and critically in danger repeating the seventh grade, Kaede is given a summer assignment: write an essay about what home means to him, which will be even tougher now that he’s on his way to Japan to reconnect with his estranged father and older half-brother. Still, if there’s a chance Kaede can finally build a new family from an old one, he’s willing to try. But building new relationships isn’t as easy as destroying his old ones, and one last desperate act will change the way Kaede sees everyone–including himself.

This is a book about what home means to us—and that there are many different correct answers.

Out May 2019

224 Pages

MY THOUGHTS:

I received this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is a middle-grade novel for ages 8-12, grades 3 to seven.  This is a middle-grade debut for this accomplished author. She also wrote Along the Indigo, coedited A Thousand Beginnings and Endings and wrote the Dualed series.

Whew, what an emotional roller coaster ride. I think every emotion I possess was activated while reading this quick read. The main character will shake your resolve and squeeze your heart.

I highly recommend this book to both tweens and adults alike. Strong prose, excellent plotting, fast-paced, and the characters… so well-developed and layered and complicated and faulted and real.

This writer has gotten better and better with each book she’s written and I can’t wait to see what she’s going to put out next.

I gave it a well-deserved: