If he says jump, she doesn't even ask "How high?" She goes out and buys a pogo stick.

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Everyone still deserves to have their say.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

What she couldn't put into word was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?