Hood (The Knitting Circle
; Comfort,
Reviews, Feb. 25) may be most recently celebrated for her adult novel and her memoir about grief, but her first YA title is a pitch-perfect comedy. Her subject here is also painful—divorce—but the narrative voice is exquisitely if unwittingly funny while true to the perspective of a child. Eleven-year-old Madeline, who assures readers up front that she's “not even a religious person,” wants to become a saint. Why? She believes that her praying has miraculously saved her father from an avalanche, and with one more miracle she can fix the unintended consequences: her father has subsequently divorced her mother, moved to Manhattan, married a chic pastry chef named Ava Pomme and fathered a baby. Hood takes no shortcuts with any of her characters, allowing them to withstand Madeline's scorn or adulation in all their complexity. Rarely has divorce been shown so astutely from a child's point of view. Ages 11-up. (Apr.)
