By Jennifer L. Holm, Matthew Holm
A pink-and-orange summer at Grandpa's Florida retirement village, which turns out to be a story about a family coming apart around a teenage brother's drinking and drugs.
Say this part first, because the cover will not: this is not a divorce book, and nobody in it separates. It's the summer of 1976 and Sunny Lewin is ten. The beach trip she was promised evaporates and she's put on a plane to her grandfather's retirement community in Florida, where the median age is about eighty, the golf carts are the only transport, and nobody will tell her why she's there. She makes a friend, Buzz, the groundskeeper's son, who hands her her first comic book and a paying job finding lost cats. It's funny. The palette is all pink and orange and it looks like a holiday. And then, a few pages at a time, in flashbacks that get harder as they go, you find out what home has been like: her big brother Dale drinking, smoking, taking things, disappearing, turning up at a family picnic drunk and stoned and swinging at their father. Sunny knew. Sunny was told not to tell. That's why she's in Florida, and she thinks it's a punishment.
It gets to the fault question through a completely different door. Sunny has not been told the truth, so she builds her own explanation out of what she has, and the explanation she builds is that she is the problem, that she is being sent away, that she should have said something or should have said nothing. The flashback structure is doing that work on purpose: your child gets Sunny's cheerful present tense and her buried past in alternating pieces, so they're assembling the real story at the same speed she is, and they arrive with her at the moment she says it out loud. That's the moment worth the book. Somebody tells a ten-year-old that a grown problem was never hers to carry and never hers to fix. The comedy is real too, the retirement community is very funny, and it's what makes the rest bearable.