Well-written story about a young girl coping with her parents' divorce. She's sees the separation as her mother's fault. Her father was handsome and traveled the world, and she thought her mother was plain. Very nice conclusion. ( )

Reviewed by Allison Fraclose for TeensReadToo.com

Twelve-year-old Madeline Vandermeer is on her way to becoming a bona fide saint. Oh, she's not religious or anything, and her family never goes to church, but she's already performed two miracles. The first was when she slid a glass of water across the kitchen table by only thinking about it. The second was when somebody called her name in the middle of the night, and she woke up with a terrible premonition that her father, on a writing assignment in Idaho, was in danger. After spending a day deep in prayer, she learned that he was one of only two people to survive an avalanche.

However, after her second miracle, everything else in her life goes downhill. Her father, now rich and famous from his harrowing experience, divorces her mother, moves into a posh apartment in uptown New York, and marries Ava Pomme, a sophisticated woman famous for her apple tarts. Soon, they have their own daughter, and Madeline and her little brother, Cody, are forced to travel between the two parents.

Madeline adores Ava and the feeling of once again being part of a family, if only for a weekend. How different Ava is from her own boring mother, who cooks disgusting food for her cooking column and embarrasses Madeline just by being there. If her mom hadn't been so ordinary, crying and scatterbrained over the simplest things, then maybe Madeline's father would have stayed. Determined to find some solace from her life, Madeline concentrates on ballet and her journey into sainthood, although that journey may not lead where she expects.

I absolutely gobbled up this book. Even though Madeline's treatment of her mother sometimes disgusted me, I found her reactions, opinions, and character flaws to be incredibly lifelike and endearing. Although I am not religious or from a divorced family, I found this book to be most enjoyable, and highly recommend it to any preteen girl. ( )

"So how did I, Madeline Vandermeer, fairly normal girl from a fairly normal family, decide to become a saint? Well, when I saved my father's life, I somehow managed to ruin everything else. Now my life was all upside down, and frankly, I needed something to happen. If I performed just one more miracle, I believed I could fix everything and become a saint." (27)

"Once in a lifetime. That was the same thing my mother had said when she'd tried to convince me to come on this trip. Was that what adults really believed, that opportunities only came once in a lifetime? I couldn't imagine that in my entire life that stretched before me that I would never again visit Italy if I wanted to, or never get the chance to live in a different country. But it seemed that adults forgot about possibility, that in a life there were always new chances to take, new roads to travel. How sad grown-ups seemed to me at that moment, with their vision of lost opporuntities and missed chances." (210) ( )