FINDING NORMAL

After a flood upends her neighborhood, 12-year-old Temple Baxter tries to help.

When heavy rains threaten the stability of the dam near their home, Temple, her parents, and her 3-year-old sister, Kennedy, are forced to evacuate in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the dam holds, but water spills over the top of it, and their one-story house is flooded up to Temple’s mom’s knee level. It needs extensive repairs, but the family doesn’t have flood insurance. Pulled out of her private school to save money, Temple has to cope with the unexplained enmity of her former classmates and the challenge of making new friends. She also embarks on an ambitious community fundraiser to collect money to help flood victims. Faris’ writing is smooth, but she stays at the surface level: The flood and its damage remain in the background, and readers never get a visceral sense of the magnitude of the family’s losses; Temple mourns her old bedroom in the abstract, as a place she used to inhabit but not as the repository of a collection of memories or items with emotional impact. The mean girls and annoying-neighbor-who-turns-out-to-be-a-friend feel more like types than fleshed-out people, and the difficulties of putting on a fundraiser dissolve too easily to ring true. Main characters read white.

These floodwaters don’t run very deep.