Hope is a Ferris Wheel

For ten-year-old Star Mackey, hope comes hard. Robin Herrera is masterful at plunking the reader into the chaos of Star’s trailer life, and making us care about how it will turn out, whether she will ever make any friends or understand her older sister or learn about her father or turn in her vocabulary words. For this reader, the story hinges on the day the four students who join her Emily Dickinson Club, precisely not the ones she wanted to have join, talk about the difference between hope and dreams. As Star, the outsider, struggles to accept other outsiders, the reader is swept along in her discoveries. When Star finally finishes her poem on hope, she finds out that sending it to the father she never met is less a hope, more a dream. Here’s a middle grade fiction that respects its young readers by an authentic examination of their deepest concerns and by refusing to tie it all up in a bow at the conclusion.Highly recommended.