By Meg Medina
A sixth-grade scholarship girl juggles a rich school, a mean classmate, and the slow, scary changes in the grandfather she loves most.
Merci Suárez is one of the few scholarship students at a fancy Florida private school, and sixth grade keeps handing her things she didn't ask for: mandatory community service, a popular classmate named Edna who seems to have decided to make her miserable, and the strange new business of who likes whom. But the thing that really tilts her year is happening at home. Her grandfather Lolo, the person she's closest to in the world, is starting to forget, to get lost, to fall, to act like someone she doesn't quite know, and the grown-ups won't tell her why. Merci has to work out for herself what's happening to him.
This is the fullest, most grown-up book on the trail, and it earns its Newbery Medal by making the ordinary feel enormous. Merci is prickly and hilarious and completely real, and Medina lets two stories run side by side: the everyday sting of being the child who can't afford what everyone else has, and the deeper ache of watching a beloved grandfather slip away. Neither is rushed or tidied up. A child who's ready to sit with a story that doesn't fix everything by the last page will find this one stays with them, because it treats them as old enough to feel something complicated.