Twig lives with her mother on the edge of Sidwell, Massachusetts. Her family mostly keeps to themselves due to their secret. When a new family moves in next door, the younger daughter, Julia, wants desperately to be Twig's friend. Can she balance having a new friend with respecting her mother's wishes?

I'm not familiar with Hoffman, other than having seen movie adaptations of her work. I know this is Hoffman's first book for the middle grade audience, and it is a wonderful fairy tale. This is another book where I felt like the ending came on suddenly, but I was sort of racing at the end to beat sleep. I think this book will be excellent for your reader that prefers a bit of magic with their realistic fiction.

I like Bollywood, and I like romance, and this one tied it together neatly.

Are you part of the one in three Americans whose family has been affected by mental illness? Then this book is for you. And even if you aren't, this book is for you. Shusterman has written a book that takes us down into the abyss with the narrator, Caden, and we stare at it, and wonder how we get back. If this wasn't MSBA reading season, I would start this book again, to follow Caden down and connect even more pieces. It is very deserving of it's place on the National Book Award Nominee list, and I will be thinking about it for years to come. I sat down and read it today, which was not necessarily what I was intending to do.

My own experience looking into that abyss is much, much milder than Caden's. I have seen it, and I have come back. Many of my friends have stared with me, and come back. I just, I want to pass this book on to so many people. I just felt it.

I liked this one. It didn't move me as much as I would have liked. It definitely felt like reading a comic in novel form. I'd give it another book before I gave up on the series overall.

I guess my biggest complaint was that I felt like there wasn't a lot of backstory or fleshed out characters. The two epilogues made me feel like there might be hope in the future, but we'll see.