What’s behind the “ nunya bidness door”? And is that a gun sticking out from Grandpop’s waistband? Reynolds’ middle-grade debut meanders like the best kind of summer vacation but never loses sense of its throughline. And he and Ernie will have to do chores, like picking peas and scooping dog poop. Then, he breaks the model truck that’s one of the only things Grandma still has of his deceased uncle. Next, there’s no Internet, so the questions he keeps track of in his notebook (over 400 so far) will have to go un-Googled. The emotional roller coaster of a contemporary white family in crisis, tempered by a touch of magic and a resilient, likable protagonist.Įleven-year-old Brooklynite Genie has “worry issues,” so when he and his older brother, Ernie, are sent to Virginia to spend a month with their estranged grandparents while their parents “try to figure it all out,” he goes into overdrive.įirst, he discovers that Grandpop is blind. Stanly copes well with problems ranging from the mundane (ineffectual cameras) to the extraordinary (photographing an evasive skeleton) to the heart-wrenching (a gravely ill sister burdened parents). Francine reacts, from the first phalangeal breakthrough, “like she was remembering something sad and happy all at once.” The close-third-person narrative doggedly expresses Stanly’s struggles with conflicting thoughts and emotions-but also keeps action rolling.

Miren quickly finds out, but although she can’t keep a secret, overworked, underpaid, and worried Mom is literally unable to see the skeleton, dubbed Princy by Miren. Stanly tries to keep his (literally) growing secret confined to his OCD–diagnosed best friend, Jaxon (who has a “cloud of black hair” but is otherwise racially unidentified). Francine, part-time cook and child care helper from Kyrgyzstan. It is peppered with whimsical asides and anatomical jokes in addition to homespun tales from Ms. This ambitious debut story of magical thinking keeps a mostly light tone despite the worsening gravity of Miren’s health throughout. Photographing and writing about this, he reasons, may lead to winning the Young Discoverer’s Prize, which will bring Dad back from 1,500 miles away, and then his little sister, Miren, might stop getting sicker. When white, zombie-obsessed, 12-year-old Stanly discovers a human skeleton growing up from his backyard-beginning as a single fingertip-he sees opportunity.

Skeleton Tree by Kim Ventrella