by Ann M. Martin
ages: 10+
First sentence: “Last summer, the summer I turned twelve, was the summer Adam came.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

It’s the summer of 1960, the summer Hattie turns 12. She lives in a small town in Connecticut (I think; I was never really sure), and she enjoys her little life: she helps her mom and dad with the boarding house they live in, in spite of Nana and Papa’s disapproval. She wanders around town, talking with her friends — none of which are her age — reading, enjoying the lazy summer days. But this summer is different: it’s the summer she finds out she has an uncle, Adam, who she never knew existed.

See, Adam, who is 21, suffers from an unnamed mental illness. And in those days, especially for people like Nana who like things just so — from insisting upon Sunday dress at the girls’ lunches she hosts, to the china plates at the Fourth of July picnic — mental illness was seen as a disgrace, something to be tucked away.

And therein lies the central conflict of the novel: Hattie doesn’t “get” Adam much of the time, but she likes him, and she understands that all he really needs is love and attention, not to be hidden away. She doesn’t understand Nana’s (and to a lesser extent, her mother’s) embarrassment of Adam. He’s her friend, and she wants him to be happy.

It doesn’t have a happy ending, however. It’s still 1960, and Adam’s problem which today could be correctly diagnosed and helped escalates into something not so happy. It’s necessary, though, to see the bad in order to see the good: Nana’s not as cold-hearted as Hattie things, and everything is infinitely more complex than an 11-year-old would like it to be.

It’s a moving novel, slim but effective in expressing one girls search for belonging and understanding of both herself, her family, and the world around her.