GET REAL

Jil [sic], an adopted eighth-grader, wonders about her biological or “real” mom, while Dez, her best friend and the narrator of the story, wonders how a neatnik like her ended up in a family of slobs. In Hicks’s perceptive, tender tale about what it really means to be a family, Jil makes contact with her birth mother and genetic half-sister, while Dez struggles to convince her poetry-spouting father and swamp-loving mother that she’s responsible enough to stick with her decisions. Although Jil’s experience with her biological family turns out to be more bitter than sweet, much of the narrative is laugh-out-loud funny, especially Dez’s interaction with her professor father and scientist mother, a woman who “watches the weather channel like it’s Sex and the City.” Poignant and playful meld seamlessly, and the life lesson—that parents are the people who go out of their way to take care of you—is germane to adopted and biological children alike. (Fiction. 10-14)