Review by Booklist Review
Twelve-year-old Glad, who lives with her father and two sisters, has a drive to fix problems. It hasn't won her any friends so far, but her classmates sometimes sidle up to her at lunchtime to ask for help with a variety of issues. Unfortunately, the assistant principal has warned Glad to stop meddling. She tries, but it's not so easy to refuse kids in distress. At home, she focuses on improving her dad in hopes of reuniting her parents. It's been 18 months since Mom left to get her head together. The family's central problem is not Glad's to solve, but she feels compelled to try. Moving at a good pace, the story's appealing first-person narrative becomes more involving as Glad's personal problems mount. With confrontations at school and disputes at home, a rising tide of uncertainty threatens to engulf her, but the story's climax brings relief and newfound clarity. Glad and her sisters are well-defined characters whose very different points of view bring tension and balance to this engaging chapter book.--Carolyn Phelan Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An inventive seventh grade fixer discovers the downside of solving others' problems.Since their mother left their family, over a year ago, narrator Gladys, 12, and her sisterspopular Mabel, 16, and brainy Agnes, 9have longed for her return. Their hardworking lawyer dad can't replace what's missing. Glad discovered her problem-solving skills three years earlier, when their mom needed an excuse for forgetting Agnes at school. Now, Glad regularly finds excuses for Mabel and provides desperate classmates with cover stories. She helps one sustain belief in a fictitious Canadian boyfriend; makes up excuses for another to miss band practice; and assists a third in shedding the girly school apparel her grandma insists on for the T-shirts and jeans she prefers. Trustworthy, dependable Glad never extracts payment for her efforts. A few friends would be nice, yet popularity eludes her. Her only lunch-table companion remains grade-skipping "Harry Homework," 10, who assists classmates with homework (Andr, the Anti-Bullying Aardvark notwithstanding) to avoid harassment. As Glad is asked to invent more-complicated fixes, school administrators are becoming suspicious. Planning for Mom's promised visit presents another challenge: keeping Dad from dating until then. Ably assisted by a diverse cast of characters, Glad (who, like her family, is white) discovers that learning how to solve one's own problems is necessary to avoid making them again.Smart, insightful, poignantleavening brutal, middle school realities with wry humor. (Fiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
