When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement. When this last is threatened, readers will ache right alongside her.Īnother stellar lap-readers will be eager to see who’s next Writing in Patty’s voice, Reynolds creates a fully dimensional, conflicted character whose hard-earned pragmatism helps her bring her relay team together, negotiate the social dynamics of the all-girls, mostly white private school she attends, and make the best of her unusual family lot. Their father dead and their birth mother’s legs lost to diabetes, the two girls live with their father’s brother and his wife, seeing their mother once a week in an arrangement that’s as imperfect as it is loving and necessary. She does this every Sunday because their white adoptive mother can’t (“there ain’t no rule book for white people to know how to work with black hair”) and because their birth mother insists they look their best for church. In the other, she braids her little sister’s hair before church, finishing off each of Maddy’s 30 braids with three beads. Running well but second is not enough for the ferociously competitive Patty. In the first, Patty misjudges her competitors in an 800-meter race she’s certain she should have won. Reynolds tells readers almost all they need to know about Patty in two opening, contrasting scenes.
African-American track phenom Patina Jones takes the baton from Ghost (2016) in the second volume of Reynolds’ Track series for middle graders.
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