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AWARDS & HONORS
2019 Bank Street Best Book of the Year
- with Outstanding Merit
2018 Junior Library Guild Selection
2018 Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year
2023 Reader's Digest 106 Best Children's Books of all Time
2019 Woman's Day Magazine Best Books to Read This Summer
Marzie's Reads 20 Best of 2018
“Riveting and real. Tender and thrilling. When I got to the end of this book I realized I was going to miss it like a friend."
— Karen Romano Young, author of Hundred Percent and Doodlebug: A Novel in Doodles
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When twelve-year-old Alice's dad moves out, leaving her with her troubled mom, Alice does the only thing that feels right: she retreats to her family's old Renaissance tent in the backyard, determined to live there until he comes home. In an attempt to keep at least one part of her summer from changing, Alice focuses on her quest to get her name on her swim team's record board. But summers contain multitudes, and soon Alice meets a new friend, Harriet, whose obsession with the school science fair is equal only to her conviction that Alice's best stroke is backstroke, not freestyle. Most unexpected of all is an unusual babysitting charge, Piper, who is mostly deaf and entirely mute - until Alice hears her speak a word.
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Funny and devastatingly honest, this sharply observed depiction of family, friendship, and Alice's determination to prove herself - as a babysitter, as a friend, as a daughter, as a person - rings loud and true.
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