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Summary
Summary
Winner of a Sydney Taylor Book Award Honor!
A heartfelt novel about a neurodivergent thirteen-year-old navigating changing friendships, a school trip, and expanding horizons for fans of Rain Reign and Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World.
Thirteen-year-old Ellen Katz feels most comfortable when her life is well planned out and people fit neatly into her predefined categories. She attends temple with Abba and Mom every Friday and Saturday. Ellen only gets crushes on girls, never boys, and she knows she can always rely on her best-and-only friend, Laurel, to help navigate social situations at their private Georgia middle school. Laurel has always made Ellen feel like being autistic is no big deal. But lately, Laurel has started making more friends, and cancelling more weekend plans with Ellen than she keeps. A school trip to Barcelona seems like the perfect place for Ellen to get their friendship back on track. Except it doesn't. Toss in a new nonbinary classmate whose identity has Ellen questioning her very binary way of seeing the world, homesickness, a scavenger hunt-style team project that takes the students through Barcelona to learn about Spanish culture and this trip is anything but what Ellen planned.
Making new friends and letting go of old ones is never easy, but Ellen might just find a comfortable new place for herself if she can learn to embrace the fact that life doesn't always stick to a planned itinerary.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sass's (Ana on the Edge) sophomore novel explores classic struggles of navigating identity, relationships, and social expectations via an autistic, queer, Jewish 13-year-old traveling on a class trip to Spain. Having carefully planned out each day based on the previous year's syllabus, Ellen Katz hopes to reconnect with best friend Laurel McKinley, starting on the flight from Georgia to Barcelona with their mostly white class. But awkwardness with Laurel and an unexpected schedule pivot--to a scavenger hunt with an unfamiliar group of students--leave the teen grasping for stability, despite the presence of Ellen's beloved Abba as a parent chaperone. Facing changing plans and conflicting loyalties, Ellen finds support in family, faith, and new friends, including nonbinary classmate Isa, who is "Latin@." The first-person narration, studded with Hebrew phrases, sympathetically details Ellen's experiences of social anxiety and sensory overload while paving a route to friends who don't blink at Ellen's accommodations--and around whom Ellen enjoys life as well as feels free to consider gender and sexuality. The story's beautiful locales and scavenger hunt puzzles frame a heartwarming story about a transitional period in life, conveyed alongside an affirming, incidental portrayal of Ellen's experiences. Ages 8--12. Agent: Jordan Hamessley, New Leaf Literary.(Mar.)
Horn Book Review
The incoming eighth-grade Spanish students from Ellen Katz's Georgia prep school take a summer field trip to Barcelona. Ellen, who is autistic, is sometimes overwhelmed by the surprises the trip presents, starting with an unexpected team scavenger hunt. Several parts of the experience lead Ellen to realize that identity isn't always clear-cut, from her father's choice to eat non-kosher food while he's chaperoning to a teammate's use of they/them pronouns. Ellen is a satisfyingly well-rounded character with complex relationships who makes mistakes and learns from them. She figures things out about herself, including trying out an adjustment to her -- or maybe sometimes their -- own pronouns. The presence of multiple queer characters allows for a variety of feelings toward what to share and how big a deal being queer is or isn't. The amazing-to-imagine (if unlikely for most readers) school trip provides an appealing backdrop, but it is the story's interpersonal aspects that are especially welcome. Shoshana Flax March/April 2022 p.(c) Copyright 2022. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
When Ellen Katz signed up for her Georgia private school's trip to Barcelona, she thought she would be spending time with her best friend, Laurel, the only person there who understands Ellen, who is autistic. So when the two are put on separate teams for the trip scavenger hunt, Ellen grows anxious about the widening distance between them. Sure, Ellen could get close to their teammates--Gibs, a white boy with ADHD who's full of jokes; Andy, a kind-hearted Asian boy who broke up with his girlfriend because he's gay; and Isa, a confident new Latinx nonbinary student--but Ellen would rather everything in her world fit into the categories she has already laid out. As Ellen learns to trust their new teammates and love Barcelona, she comes to terms with a new understanding of the world and their own identity, including the choice to use both she/her and they/them pronouns. Sass' (Ana on the Edge, 2020) sophomore novel shines in its nuanced characterizations, subversion of stereotypes, and world that celebrates autism for the joy it brings Ellen when they are happily flapping. A tender, sweet coming-of-age story that brilliantly includes Ellen's autism, LGBTQ+ identity, and Judaism in an engaging, fun scavenger-hunt plot that explores what happens when we take things one day at a time.