Fish in a Tree meets The Thing About Jellyfish in this heartfelt middle grade debut about long-buried secrets, the power of memory, and the bond between a girl and her grandmother.
All Lulu Carter wants is to be seen. But her parents are lost in their own worlds, and Lulu has learned the hard way that having something as rare as HSAM—the ability to remember almost every single moment in her life—won’t make you popular in school.
At least Lulu has Gram, who knows the truth about Lulu’s memory and loves her all the more for it. But Gram has started becoming absentminded, and the more lost she gets, the more she depends on Lulu…until Lulu realizes her memory holds the very key to fixing Gram’s forgetfulness. Once Lulu learns that trauma can cause amnesia, all she needs to do to cure Gram is hunt down that painful moment in Gram’s life.
With her friends Olivia and Max, Lulu digs into Gram’s mysterious past. But they soon realize some secrets should stay buried, and Lulu wonders if she ever knew Gram at all. It’s up to Lulu to uncover the truth before the only person who truly sees her slips away.---from the publisher
352 pages 978-1534439566 Ages 8-12
Keywords: memory, special gifts, fitting in, grandmother, multigenerational, secrets, 8 year old, 9 year old, 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old
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Lulu lives with her parents, younger brother Clay, and grandmother Sue in San Francisco. Family life has been rough since the death of a toddler sister when Lulu was three, but her grandmother's presence has been a stabilizing one, and the grandmother is the only one Lulu has told about her secret. Lulu has Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, and can remember every detail of her entire life. She has mentioned specific facts about events in the past to people at school, and has gotten a poor reaction, so doesn't want anyone to know. Now, her grandmother is beginning to forget things. Lulu starts to realize how bad things are getting when her grandmother can't find her car in the mall parking lot, and is determined to hide this memory loss from her parents, lest her grandmother move to a senior facility. In order to help her grandmother remember, Lulu liberates a journal her grandmother has promised her. To her surprise, it is in a foreign script that she and her friend Olivia figure out in Cyrillic.
Having been told her grandmother was from France, Lulu wants to figure out the mystery of her past. Max, whose father owns the riding stable where the girls take lessons, offers to help with some of the searching on the computer, and he also manages to hack into his uncle's government database, where he finds a file on the grandmother, complete with redacted pages! The grandmother has contacted an old friend, Yakov, and between talking to him and getting more stories from her grandmother, Lulu is able to piece together the real story. She also must find a way to tell her parents about her own memory, and convince her parents to spend more time with her and her brother.
Strengths: The chapters start with a little bit of information about the functions of the brain, which is fascinating. It helps that the snippets are also very short, so they don't stop the flow of the narrative. Even though there is a lot going on, this was well written enough that I was able to remember what happened and keep the characters straight, which isn't always the case! The San Francisco setting is fun, the inclusion of horse riding, as well as girl drama, will draw in readers interested in equestrian matters, and the mystery surrounding the grandmother's past intriguing.
Weaknesses: I'm never a fan of the grieving parent trope, but at least the family was getting better. Making the grandmother's past a little less complicated (the romantic twists and turns got a bit much) would have made this a more manageable length, but it wasn't bad.
What I really think: Definitely buying, since it will appeal to readers who ask for mysteries, problem novels, and books with horses. The cover will ensure steady circulation.
Recommended by: Karen Yingling, Librarian, Ohio, USA
See more of her recommendations: msyinglingreads.blogspot.com
