Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick

This is a fast, serious, sarcastic, reassuring YA read. I'm serious. This is perfect for middle school. Even the format and layout is excellent. Arial-type font, lots of white space to help feel like you're flying through the pages. At the onset, the protagonist is easy to identify with. Steven Alper is an 8th grade boy grappling with his goals (drumming and Renee), girls (Renee and Annette), and his family. Steven's first person narration is well-mixed with sincere reflection and emotion and sarcasm and humor.

By the second chapter, Steven's five-year old brother, Jeffrey, has been diagnosed with leukemia. The story flies by as Steven relates how his family copes (in good ways and in bad) with the cancer. Steven withdraws, agonizes over his brother, and go through many other emotions as he tries to come to terms with how he should be handling this situation and his life. Through Steven's narration, the reader will also fall in love with his charming and brave little brother. The other characters are well-drawn, although we don't get a lot of insight into them; however, this is first-person narration.

This is an excellent, but quick read. If I give any more information, I'll be taking away a good bit of the story. I'll leave with a fun reflection from Steven.

We argued back and forth about this for a while. Initially, my mom was on my dad's side, but as the "discussion" (It's amazing - my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortars back at me, and Jeffrey was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my parents would say we should stop having this public "discussion.") ...

Grade: A