I’m too cranky to re-write the whole thing or to be “fair and balanced,” so you’ll have to make due with the snarky summary version:

Like everyone in her family (including both her grandparents, even though this is apparently genetic), Mibs finds out her special talent, her “savvy,” on her 13th birthday. But her dad ends up in a coma, and her birthday is a whole big roadtripping misadventure with her siblings and the preacher’s kids and a dude who drives a Bible delivery van.

It’s so sweet it’ll make your teeth hurt, there are 14 overwritten similes in the first 11 pages, and everyone loves it but me. Including a lot of kids: it has a loving family and no real danger, so it’s good for the sort of kids who hate problem novels or anything “edgy.” If you have a market for Christian-friendly books, this is probably a good choice. But then, I’m a northeastern liberal atheist Jew, so you might not want to take my word for it.

The end.

(Man, that took like eight minutes. I should write all my reviews this way!)

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I opened my hand to give away my last gift, the [weaving] shuttle they had made for me two years ago when I came to live with them. It was the last piece of the life I knew, and I put it in Blue Leaf’s hand. “The gift moves,” I said, somehow letting out the words and keeping in the tears.
“It moves,” she replied.
Blue Leaf and Bone held up their hands and looked at me. I hoped they wouldn’t try to touch me. I didn’t know how to leave.
“Go now, Path,” said Blue Leaf. “Go. Take with you what we have given you. Let it grow. Let it open wide.”

Believe it or not, this is post-apocalyptic science fiction. It’s an agrarian almost-utopia, which I’m starting to see more and more (The Secret Beneath My Skin, The People of Sparks). Only there’s no dis- hiding beneath this utopia. Everyone seems genuinely happy in their post-consumer hippie paradise.

As to whether you’ll like it, that quote is pretty representative of the whole book. There are some cool feats of bioengineering (batteries do grow on trees!), but otherwise… there’s a lot of emotional discussion of leaving and finding homes, a lot of giving gifts and receiving gifts, a lot of people named things like Blue Leaf and Path.

And everything is written like a folk song, which is appropriate because apparently this started out as a folk song, until George Ella (according to the dedication) told the author it “sounded like a story and not a song.” I’m not sure I agree.

Also reviewed at: Curled Up With a Good Book.

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