Glitter Gets Everywhere

Gr 5-8–When your world comes tumbling down, the last thing you want to do is change what’s left. Unfortunately for Kitty, that’s just what’s happening to her. After she loses her mother to cancer, her father gets an opportunity to work in New York City for a short time. Kitty tries to fight it, even, in one hilarious sequence, creating a slideshow of pigeons getting into a subway car to dissuade her pigeon-fearing father. Nevertheless, they go to New York for one semester. Both Kitty and her sister, Imogen, see therapists in New York to deal with their grief; Clark offers a solid depiction of therapy as positive and sometimes necessary. Throughout, Kitty deals with her grief openly and honestly, doing her best to work through it. When describing her grief and the world around her, the precocious 10-year-old uses lyrical language that can seem too mature for her years. Readers from New York City and London will delight in the descriptors for both cities, including a plot point involving The Great British Baking Show (as Americans call it). Few descriptors are given for Kitty and other characters, besides hair; most characters seem to be cued as white.