APPLE PIE PROMISES

Lily has big plans for this year’s fall festival: She and her mother are going to bake the wining pie together.

But then Mom announces she’s moving to Morocco for a year on a fellowship, and Lily is going to live with her father and his new family. Lily’s not looking forward to it, but at least she doesn’t have to change schools and she can still enter the pie contest. Stepmom Kimberly is welcoming, but stepsister Hannah? Not so much. She’s cold and standoffish and a bit full of herself. To add to the tension, the girls have to share a room. Their living styles aren’t exactly compatible: Lily is a tidy, organized planner, and Hannah…is not. But Lily has promised Mom she’ll do her best to get along with Hannah. Unfortunately, Hannah has other plans, and soon the girls are pranking each other back and forth, often with real consequences. Can the girls end this prank war before someone really gets hurt? Readers will note some bumpy plot points, such as Lily’s surprise when Hannah retaliates and that Dad and Kimberly are so wrapped up in their own problems, they don’t notice their daughters aren’t as sisterly as they’d hoped they’d be. Seventh-grader Lily narrates in an exposition-heavy first-person perspective loaded with exclamations and interrobangs. Lily is multiracial and presents white: white on her father’s side and with a Moroccan great-grandfather on her mother’s. Lily’s possible crush is biracial, the son of a Vietnamese-American father and Swedish mother. Several other characters of color are suggested by naming convention.

Uneven and unsubtle—but sweet