MMGM: Summer of the Gypsy Moths, by Sara Pennypacker

My thinking is that if you can have Christmas in July, you should be able to have summer in December, right? Right. So today I’m spotlighting a book I actually did read when it was still warm outside: The Summer of the Gypsy Moths, by Sara Pennypacker.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Stella loves living with Great-aunt Louise in her big old house near the water on Cape Cod for many reasons, but mostly because Louise likes routine as much as she does, something Stella appreciates since her mom is, well, kind of unreliable. So while Mom "finds herself," Stella fantasizes that someday she'll come back to the Cape and settle down. The only obstacle to her plan? Angel, the foster kid Louise has taken in. Angel couldn't be less like her name—she's tough and prickly, and the girls hardly speak to each other.
But when tragedy unexpectedly strikes, Stella and Angel are forced to rely on each other to survive, and they learn that they are stronger together than they could have imagined. And over the course of the summer they discover the one thing they do have in common: dreams of finally belonging to a real family.

I admit, I read this book mostly because of the raving MMGM posts I was reading back then. Contemporary summer stories have to be really good to catch my attention, for the mere reason that there are so many of them. (It’s also a genre that my critique partner Betsy Devaney is very good at, and she’s spoiled me...) But a few pages into this book, I realized why everyone was so impressed. Sara Pennypacker is a darn confident writer. She took the old trope of summer-with-the-zany-old-aunt and made it do backflips by announcing--basically on the first page--that the aunt dies (so it’s not really a spoiler). She didn’t write a story about dealing with death...and yet it did, in a more poignant and powerful way than a book directly about that would have. In the same way, the book wasn’t about finding a friend or missing your mother needing a father or handling fate, yet in a roundabout way it was precisely about all of those things. It was Sara Pennypacker’s masterful subtlety that made every page of her story surprising and gripping...and surprisingly gripping, considering its genre and the small scope of its story.

So if you’re feeling chilly, curl up by the heat register with Summer of the Gypsy Moths and imagine you’re summering in Cape Cod. :)

To find more Marvelous Middle Grade Monday recommendations, visit the blog of Shannon Messenger, the genius behind it all...