By Jamie Sumner
Ellie's twelve, she uses a wheelchair, and she wants to win Bake Off — then her family leaves Nashville for a small Oklahoma town to look after her grandpa, whose memory is slipping.
Ellie Cowan is twelve. She uses a wheelchair, she watches The Great British Bake Off like it's scripture, and she writes letters to Mary Berry that she never mails. She has a whole plan for her life. Then her grandpa Jonah's Alzheimer's gets bad enough that Mema can't manage him on her own, so Ellie and her mom pack up Nashville and move into the trailer next door in Eufaula, Oklahoma. Now she's the new girl in the wheelchair, and she's one of the trailer-park children too, which at this school is its own separate category. She gets an aide she never asked for. She gets a ramp that doesn't go anywhere useful. And she gets Coralee, who wants to be a country singer and says whatever pops into her head, and Bert, who recites facts and needs things to happen in the right order. The three of them start scheming about how to make Oklahoma a place Ellie actually wants to stay.
Ellie is annoyed, and that's what makes the book go. She's annoyed at the ramp, at the aide hovering three feet away, at her mother who won't let her push her own chair, at grown-ups who talk to her slowly. She isn't grateful and she isn't brave-for-the-camera, and she's very funny about all of it. A child who has a disability may find that voice a relief, someone finally writing the irritation down instead of the courage. A child who doesn't may come away understanding, fast, that the wheelchair is the boring part and the people fussing around it are the problem. And under the comedy sits Jonah, wandering out at night and not always sure who Ellie is, while she fights to be more independent right as her family is being pulled toward needing more help, not less.