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The Center of Everything. by Linda Urban. March 5, 2013. Harcourt Children's Books. 208 pages. ISBN: 9780547763484

Ruby Pepperdine lives in the small town of Bunning, New Hampshire, where everyone is obsessed with donuts. On Bunning Day, at the town parade, Ruby will be reading her essay about the history of Bunning, which was selected as the winner from among many submissions. This is a great honor, of course, but Ruby has bigger things on her mind - mainly, the fact that her grandmother, Gigi, died, and Ruby didn’t listen when she tried to give her a final important message. Ruby has used her birthday wish to ask for a way to make things right, and she has been looking for signs ever since, but if nothing happens before Bunning Day ends, Ruby can’t imagine how she will move on.

Like Linda Urban’s last book, Hound Dog True, this is a sensitive and introspective middle grade novel, this time about one girl’s struggle to find her place after losing someone close to her. The novel has an interesting structure, in that the entire story takes place on Bunning Day, but events taking place in the present are interspersed with flashbacks to the recent past that give context to Ruby’s actions on Bunning Day. It is in the flashback sequences that the reader gets to know Gigi, as well as Ruby’s best friend, Lucy and her new friend Nero Deniro. These flashbacks also reveal Ruby as a nervous girl who worries about appearances and the way things are “supposed to be.” She wants to mourn correctly, to do the right thing in all situations for all people, and when she doesn’t feel that she has lived up to these external expectations, she takes it very hard. She is a girl who believes that her world is infused with meaning, and that it’s up to her to decode the signs she is given and make sense of what her grandmother, or the universe might be trying to tell her.

I didn’t care very much for Hound Dog True, but The Center of Everything spoke to me much more clearly. I could relate to Ruby’s silent suffering at the loss of her grandmother, and to the burden of perfectionism that she places on her own shoulders. I became deeply engrossed in the small-town atmosphere, and the Bunning Day parade reminded me of so many parades I attended as a kid in my own small town. Ruby’s younger cousins’ interest in the candy being thrown from the parade floats brought back so many memories.

Though The Center of Everything won’t appeal to every reader, it is a special book that will undoubtedly speak volumes of truth to certain readers. Kids who have connected with Linda Urban’s books in the past will find more of the same humor and sensitivity in The Center of Everything. It is also a great read-alike for Criss-Cross by Lynn Rae Perkins, The Boy on Cinnamon Street by Phoebe Stone and One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street by Joann Rocklin. Though it’s very early in the year to be considering next year’s potential Newbery contenders, this book looks like Newbery material to me - and several others on Goodreads have said the same. I highly recommend this slim, but powerful novel, to middle grade readers and their parents, librarians, and teachers.

I received a digital ARC of The Center of Everything from Harcourt Children's Books via NetGalley. The book will be published tomorrow, March 5, 2013.

For more about this book, visit Goodreads. 

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Hound Dog True is a quiet, middle grade novel about a girl named Mattie Breen, who is extremely shy, and worries about many things. She and her mom have had to move a lot, due to changes and shifts in her mom's jobs, and that has made the prospect of starting fifth grade at yet another new school even more frightening. This time, though, Mattie has a plan. Since her Uncle Potluck is the janitor at the school, she's going to learn everything there is to know about his work and then become his apprentice so she can avoid having to socialize with her classmates during recess. Her apprenticeship to Uncle Potluck takes an unexpected turn, however, and she realizes she's going to have to face her peers. To do so, she will also have to face some demons from her past and perhaps even trying making friends with Quincy Sweet, an older, cooler girl in her new neighborhood.

I am having a hard time collecting my thoughts about this book. I really wanted to read it, since I loved A Crooked Kind of Perfect so much, but somehow I didn't connect with it as well as I expected. The book has a lot of really strong elements. For example, I loved the specificity of Mattie's experiences. The very simplest of things, such as the loss of a pajama button, or the violation of a private notebook by a nosy classmate, take on a deep and almost indescribable significance in Mattie's life, which really drew her out as a character and provided a lot of insight into her personality and anxieties. I also thought Mattie's shyness was one of the strongest aspects of the book. I think it's difficult to understand the paralyzing feeling of not knowing how to interact with other kids, and even more difficult to put into words, but Urban pulls it off.

Still, though, something in this book didn't work for me. I liked many of the individual story threads, but I never felt like those threads formed one cohesive whole. I was frequently confused, particularly by the continuous use of the word "plunk," and by Mattie's devastation over her lost pajama button, and her need to apologize to it. I could understand her feelings well enough from a logical standpoint, but I never got to the point where I also felt them myself. Usually, I can get into a child's mindset when I'm reading a children's book, but I never saw Mattie from anything but an adult point of view. One of the reviews I saw on Goodreads mentioned that this book would be adored by adults, but maybe not so much by children, and that's the impression it gave me. The writing is strong, even if I wasn't crazy about all of  the characters, and the childhood difficulties Mattie faces are the kinds of things people of all ages can recognize from their own lives, but I didn't connect with Mattie, and I suspect middle grade readers may not either.

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Here's what some other bloggers have to say about Hound Dog True...

Urban’s writing style can be summed up in one word: likeable. And this is a supremely likeable book. A great new Urban title that won’t disappoint her already existing fans and may lure in new ones. - Elizabeth Bird, Fuse #8

This is a book that will speak

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