Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

While in Idaho this week, I finished reading Martha Freeman’s Effie Starr Zook Has One More Question to my 12-year-old, and to be honest, I was mostly disappointed. The premise was amazing, you know? A city girl staying with her aunt and uncle for the summer, bumping into and then confronting long-held family secrets…what’s not to love? Unfortunately, I found all of the characters to be solidly two-dimensional; instead of being a great story, it was a series of chapters of “she did this” and then “he did that” and then “they said this”, etc. It wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t good; it was, in a word, fine. Now, if your middle grade girl likes contemporary fiction and uncomplicated storytelling, the family secrets and the themes introduced by them make for a positive message; if you’re an adult who enjoys good middle grade, however, this isn’t terribly worth your time.*

*Also, adults are likely to wonder about Mr. Yoder’s troubling beliefs and what they would actually mean for his family, not to mention the inconsistencies of his wife’s actions in relation to those beliefs. Because seriously.