Skip to main content

The Center of Everything

By

The Center of Everything
by Linda Urban
Harcourt, 2013.  194 pgs. Fiction.

     Even though the next Newbery announcement is ten months away, Linda Urban's new book is already getting buzz along that front.  Rightly so.  Ruby Pepperdine lives in Bunning, New Hampshire, named for Captain Cornelius Banning who invented the doughnut hole when he poked his wife's doughnuts on the spokes of his ship's wheel during a terrible storm. Ruby's best friend and companion in the world was her grandmother Gigi, who taught her about the constellations, how to make her mind like water to absorb and diffuse all impacts, and how to care for people who needed to be cared for.  But Grandma Gigi is dead and Ruby has gone underwater.  No one really notices: not her family, not her best friend Lucy.  And now Ruby is facing her hardest day, the Bunning Day Parade which Grandma Gigi loved and participated in as a member of the Grannies for Groceries.  Ruby has made a wish, one she thinks will come true because she threw a quarter from the year she was born through the doughnut hole on Captain Bunning's statue. She wants to go back in time to just before her grandmother died to listen to what she was trying to tell her, to do what she needed to do instead of what she was told to do.  Time travel turns out not to be possible, even with the help of her old friend Lucy and her new friend Nero DeNiro, son of the owner of Delish doughnuts and asker of impertinent but interesting questions at school.  But remembering, and listening and learning from what one remembers are possible. So that is what Ruby does.  What a beautiful, funny, tender story.  Might not win the Newbery, but should certainly be in the running.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Alice with a Why

By
Alice with a Why By Anna James New York: Penguin, 2026. Fiction. 240 pgs. In 1919, in the aftermath of the first World War, Alyce is living with her grandmother in the English countryside. Her grandmother, also named Alice, tells Alyce (with a y) stories from her childhood adventures in a wonderful land filled with white rabbits and mad hatters. Alyce doesn't really believe the silly stories, she just misses her father who was killed in the war. One day, Alyce receives a mysterious invitation to tea, and subsequently falls into a pond where she is transported to Wonderland. Her grandmother, of course, is that Alice. Alyce is prompted by the Mad Hatter, Dormouse, and March Hare to seek out the Time Being and put an end to the war between the Sun King and the Queen of the Moon. Thus begins Alyce's adventure through Wonderland. I have a certain soft spot for the original story of Alice in Wonderland. It is one of my particular favorites and I often have a hard time reading new int...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

By
A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more