by Wendy Mass
ages: 10+
First sentence: “Freak.“
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Mia doesn’t quite know how to deal with her world. She seems normal from the outside, possibly the most normal in her family. She likes to paint, she has been best friends with Jenna since forever, and she does okay at school. Except she has a secret: sounds, numbers and letters have a color for her. You wouldn’t think this was a big deal, but back in third grade, when she tried to tell people, everyone — adults and kids alike — thought she was making things up. So, she stopped telling people, quietly bearing the burden of being a… freak.
Then she hits eighth grade and things start to fall apart for her. She finally admits the color “thing” to her parents, they take her to a series of doctors, finally diagnosing her with synesthesia. On the one hand, this is good: Mia is no longer a freak, or alone in dealing with the challenges that synesthesia brings. On the other hand, Mia delves into an intense regimen of self-discovery, inadvertently shutting out her family, her friends, her schoolwork, and (perhaps most of all) her cat, Mango.
It’s an interesting growing up story; Mia has so much to deal with on her plate — from the usual teenage stuff, to sibling stuff, not to mention all the colors which color her life — that there’s just so much to juggle. On the one hand, it’s a very teenagery book, and because of that, Mia was a bit much to handle. There were some issues that never got resolved for me (as a parent, admittedly), and the story just didn’t quite gel as well as I wanted or hoped. On the other hand, the descriptions of what Mia sees was so vivid, so amazing that it almost made me jealous I can’t see the world that way. My “normal” world seems so boring in comparison.
Which is one of the reasons I like Wendy Mass so much: she takes something not-quite-mainstream — like synesthesia or astronomy — and weaves a story around it in such a way that makes you want to have a similar experience, even if the story isn’t all that great.
Which is why I keep reading her books.
The Book Nut 
Weird. I wouldn't have thought of synesthesia as something a doctor would have to diagnose. Joey (my 14yo) has it — he associates colors with many things including the days of the week — but it's never been an issue, just one of his quirks. I think I want to read thi book just to find out what “challenges” synesthesia could cause.
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I loved Mango Shaped Space and read it after my daughter en joyed it so much that she encouraged me to read it. I had never heard of synesthesia before reading this book, and interestingly, I found characters with synesthesia in several other books I read shorty thereafter – The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch and Out of My MInd by Sharon Draper. Fascinating to read about, and nice for other kids who have synesthesia to be able to read about characters like themselves.
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