Twelve-year-old Ashley Dalton, who prefers to be called Ash, has one refuge in the world: a walnut tree in the yard of her foster mother\u2019s rental house, where she lives along with her foster mother\u2019s volatile son, his girlfriend, and their baby, who shares a room with Ash. Middle school, where Ash gets bullied for being unfeminine in her clothing and appearance, is scary and threatening. And then, making things worse, her new social studies teacher assigns the class to draw family trees. Ash\u2019s past is no one\u2019s business but her own. Eventually, with the help of her friends Gentry Noble (a gentle boy who\u2019s lost his own mother) and Joss Cruz (a supremely cool girl who\u2019s also concealing family secrets)\u2014along with adults who listen to Ash, appreciate her talents, and ask the students to consider what they don\u2019t know\u2014she finds the courage to confide in a teacher and her friends about the trouble she\u2019s in. Gordon\u2019s middle-grade debut is gritty, messy, and honest, with complex, nuanced characters navigating a realistically complex world that includes abuse, drug use, and homophobia. Ash\u2019s simple request at the end\u2014\u201cI want to live with people who actually care about me\u201d\u2014feels earned, and attainable. Ash and Gentry read white, and Joss is cued Latine.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twelve-year-old Ashley Dalton, who prefers to be called Ash, has one refuge in the world: a walnut tree in the yard of her foster mother\u2019s rental house, where she lives along with her foster mother\u2019s volatile son, his girlfriend, and their baby, who shares a room with Ash. Middle school, where Ash gets bullied for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}