By Holly Goldberg Sloan
A brilliant, offbeat twelve-year-old loses both her adoptive parents in a car crash and slowly gathers a whole new family out of near-strangers.
Willow Chance counts by 7s to calm herself down, diagnoses strangers' medical conditions for fun, and has no friends to speak of. Then, one ordinary afternoon, a police officer comes to her school to say that both her parents have been killed in a car crash. Willow is adopted, and now she has no one. The rest of the book is what happens next: a pushy classmate named Mai, Mai's wary older brother and warm-hearted mother, a burned-out school counselor, and a cab driver who keeps turning up all begin to circle Willow, and the story follows them day by day as their lives tangle into one another's.
This is the shelf's book for an older child who reads on their own and is ready for a whole novel about grief. The loss is about as sudden and complete as loss gets, both parents at once, but the book spends most of its energy on the after: the odd, kind, unrelated people who close ranks around a grieving girl and turn into her family. And Willow is such funny, particular company that the sadness never takes the book over. If your child has lost someone, this one may land hard, and it may also be a comfort; you'll have a better sense than I do of which.