By Debra Green
4RBooks: 5+/6, grades 5-8
Amazon rating: 4.7/5, grade level 3-7
Good Reads: 4/5
Common Sense Media: not yet reviewed
278 pages
Synopsis:
Violet is a 12-year-old math whiz, but hardly anybody knows. She doesn’t think that will make her popular, so she hides her talents at school. She uses math to try and understand and make sense of the world, especially the use of charts and graphs. Pie charts are her favorite, probably because she also loves pie, her favorite dessert. She has one best friend, McKenzie who tends to dominate and control the relationship.
They both decide to try out for the school musical, The Wizard of Oz. Violet surprises herself, and everyone else with her try out and is chosen to be the Cowardly Lion. McKenzie is chosen to be a monkey and decides to quit the play. Violet stays and starts new friendships with other cast members like Ally and Diego. This puts a strain on her friendship with McKenzie.
All of this is happening as her family is falling apart. After years of disagreements and arguments her father packs up one night and leaves. Even worse, he decides he needs some time to himself and doesn’t answer any of Violet’s texts or emails. Violet and her mom haven’t had the best relationship, but now they only have each other. Violet must use her math skills and new-found personal skills to navigate school, the play, her friends and her family.
Parental Guidance: low
*Lots of family drama.
For much of the book Violet is rude and disrespectful towards her mother.
Violet’s dad leaves and doesn’t stay in contact with Violet. He is immature
and drinks more than he should.
McKenzie’s father has passed away. Her mom is a hoarder who doesn’t
take care of herself, her home, or McKenzie.
Ally and her sisters live with their grandparents because their mother is a drug addict.
*Violet and McKenzie have various rude nicknames for people including their teachers and
principal.
Recommendation:
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking of how much school counselors and psychologists would enjoy using this with many of their students. As mentioned in the parental guidance section, there is a lot of family dramas going on and the three main characters (children) are all struggling to deal with their situations, and learning what it means to be supportive with their friends going through their own struggles. This can strain their friendship at times and lots of lessons are learned as they do their best to stay connected. Violet is a math whiz and tries to work out her home and school situations with math. There is an amazing paragraph at the end of the book where Violet summarizes all she has learned.
“I shouldn’t have tried to solve my parents’ problems with math. I should have solved my own problems with math. I’d made so many charts, but my focus had been off. It was like endlessly trying to calculate the exact amount of pi instead of using pi to discover more about circles and spheres, which is the real point. I’d focused on the subtraction and division of broken homes and fractured friendships, but I should have been thinking about the addition and multiplication of new friends and growing relationships.”
She adds… “I realized life is like a pie chart – it always fills up. When one slice gets thinner or even disappears, another slice expands to take its place. And the new slice may be even better than the old one. So you have to be willing to try new things.”
I really enjoyed this book. I think mature 5th and 6th graders could handle the themes in the story, but it is probably best as a middle school novel. Violet is a fun, interesting, and quirky character. She reminds me of Leonard from The Big Bang Theory; she is very smart but not very confident. She lets her best friend McKenzie bully her and is scared to step out on her own… until she does. Once she begins to let herself be challenged, new doors are opened. She plays the Cowardly Lion in the school play, and like the lion, finds her courage at the end.
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