middle grade

In her seventh grade year, Rachel Brooks plans to start on her school’s soccer team, hang with her best friends and maybe get a boyfriend. She doesn’t plan to wear a hard plastic back brace twenty-three hours a day that stretches from her shoulders to her hips.

Rachel needs the brace to prevent the curve in her spine, caused by scoliosis, from getting worse. She understands how important it is, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the brace changes everything. Wearing clothes, playing soccer, even hanging with her friends become new and daunting challenges. To make matters worse, her mother doesn’t seem to understand why she’s having such a hard time adjusting to life in the brace.

Readers will ache as Rachel confronts cruelty at school, misunderstandings at home and disappointments on the soccer field. Author Alyson Gerber has crafted an honest, realistic, funny voice that will draw readers in and keep them rooting for Rachel till the very end. Particularly poignant are the complicated relationships that Gerber draws between Rachel and her mother and Rachel and her best friends.

An important book about finding inner strength even in difficult situations.