MIMI'S TREASURE TROUBLE

A girl’s quest for treasure alienates her friends.

Mimi lives in an apartment in Periwinkle Tower, where most of her friends live as well. Their current project is to dig a tunnel so that Sofie, who isn’t lucky enough to live in Periwinkle Tower, can sneak in and live among her friends. What Mimi hasn’t told her friends is that her reasons for helping dig the tunnel aren’t entirely altruistic: She’s hoping to find buried treasure. When that information comes to light, and after Mimi insults her friend Yoshi and calls him “stupid,” her friends abandon her. She has to swallow some humble pie if she wants to win them back. Though their town of Pueblo del Mar is ostensibly in the United States and Mimi and her friends attend school, there are no parents in this world, and the children drive their own cars and cook their own food. The shallow conflicts in the story shift chapter by chapter, and the worldbuilding is neither realistic nor fantastical, putting it in an uncomfortable nowhereland. Bobblehead-style illustrations present a diverse cast of characters, but Mimi’s ever present sombrero (a gift from Yoshi after a bad haircut) feels like a cheap way to signal that the character is Latina. It seems the book wants us to laugh with it, but it’s much easier to laugh at it.

Both meandering and implausible even when suspending disbelief.