Sometimes wise children in novels are too precocious and inwardly driven not only for their own good, but for an acceptably realistic viewpoint. Nenny is a third grader who is scared of almost everything around her in 1988, but her mother, a nurse working graveyard shift to help support their newly blended family, has scarce time to listen nor to make Nenny feel safer. They share a house with Mom's new husband Rick, his two kids, and Nenny's two brothers, but their lives are shadowed by the troubles of Nenny's dad, a teacher who lives in a sad apartment building with a scummy swamp for a pool, and Winthrop, Rick's ex-wife, who's remarried to a drunkard. Nenny is haunted by the Vietnam War (Rick was a medic and her dad was grading papers when she watched Platoon on his VCR); the nuns in her Catholic school (in a brilliantly funny passage, her younger brother Tiny builds and mans a cardboard confessional), and by her cruel teenage stepsister. All is going along non-swimmingly when something even worse happens. There are many amusing and powerful scenarios in this novel, but somehow an eight year old isn't the age-appropriate vehicle for them.

Quotes: “All their meals are linked with ampersands: beans & franks, spaghetti & meatballs, macaroni & cheese. It’s divorced dad fare. Cheap & not good for you, but tasty & easy to prepare.”

“What you should fear is that you will never, ever anticipate the thing that all along you should have feared the most.” ( )