Dancing makes Merci Suárez almost as queasy as love does, especially now that Tía Inés, her merengue-teaching aunt, has a new man in her life. Unfortunately, Merci can’t seem to avoid love or dance for very long. She used to talk about everything with her grandfather, Lolo, but with his Alzheimer’s getting worse each day, whom can she trust to help her make sense of all the new things happening in her life? The Suárez family is back in a touching, funny story about growing up and discovering love’s many forms, including how we learn to love and believe in ourselves. If you’re an adult and you hear the phrase “middle schooler,” you likely have one of two strong reactions: AHHHHH!!! or AWWWWW. Or both. Strangely, my memories of middle school are so awful, so depressing, that I actually loved working with tweens in my professional life. I think I felt like I had the chance to mold all of those kids into the kind of people I would have wanted to go to school with. Still, I don’t want that time back for myself. You couldn’t pay me to walk into that building if I were parched and it had the only water for miles. Reading about middle school, however, is wonderful. These days, there is so much marvelous middle grade and lower YA literature out there that I have every hope that Zoomers and…Quaranteens? will fare better in reading and in life than the Millennials and Xers before them. So. Are you ready to bust out that yearbook and cringe at your Von Dutch hat, popped collar, Tamagotchi keychain, half-unbuckled denim overalls, LipSmackers, Air Jordans, flannel plaids, or Uggs? In this quiz, you’ll revisit the good and the bad parts of your middle school self, and then it’ll spit out the perfect recent tween read for you. For more, you can tune into our Kidlit These Days and Hey YA podcasts!
