By Booki Vivat
Abbie Wu is starting middle school sure she's going to fail at everything, mostly because she doesn't have a 'thing' the way everyone else seems to. It's a funny, doodle-packed novel about her figuring out that she doesn't need one to matter.
Abbie Wu is in crisis. She's always in crisis. Middle school is about to start, and as far as Abbie can tell, everyone around her has a Thing, a talent or a passion or some obvious reason they're special, and she has none. Her older brother, her younger sister, the other children at school: all sorted. She's just ordinary, and to Abbie that feels like the end of the world. So she worries her way through the everyday disasters of sixth grade, the impossible lunch system, the locker that won't open, the group projects that go sideways, and all of it spills out in frantic, funny doodles that crowd the margins and sometimes swallow a whole page. Somewhere in the middle of the panic, Abbie trips over the one thing she's actually good at, without ever planning to, and starts to figure out that being ordinary doesn't mean she has nothing to say.
This one sits at the older end of the worried-perfectionist shelf. Some children get it into their heads that if they're not special at something they don't really count, and they can tie themselves in knots over it. Abbie's constant sense of impending doom is that same worry drawn as comedy, and that's why it helps: a child who catastrophizes the way she does gets to laugh at it from the outside for once. Its quiet point is that you don't need one defining Thing to be worth something, and that's aimed right at the child busy measuring themselves against everybody else. The wall-to-wall doodles keep it fast and light, so it never reads like a heavy 'issue' book, and a reluctant reader can fall in on the pictures and stay for the jokes.