This is a story about a 7th-grade girl (Bridge), her two best girlfriends (Emily and Tab), and her new friend-who-is-a-boy, Sherm. Beyond that description, it’s hard to say exactly what it’s about. It’s a record of Bridge’s experiences with school, with her friends, and with her family, interspersed with letters from Sherm to his grandfather, and chapters written in second person by an unknown protagonist who lives in Bridge’s universe but who is perhaps a bit older, and who is obviously unhappy about something…but what?

It’s an odd little book. If you read it purely on the surface, you may get frustrated with it as “story.” It meanders. It wanders from Bridge’s friendships and day-to-day experiences to Sherm’s grandfather’s desertion to the unknown older teenager taking her “day-cation” from school to ponder recent events, giving equal weight to all of them, and if you are looking at it just as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, at first you feel a bit unmoored. Is there a story here? Is there a point at which the author means you to arrive? You might feel a little impatient with it and want to say Hey, what’s the plot here? even when you are halfway through the book.

But if you read this book more philosophically, you see that everyone in it is struggling with their sense of self, and not in the way many people portray that, where something happens and the character’s personality magically and immediately solidifies around that event. This book is really dealing with life as it is lived, where people have small realizations and epiphanies as they go along, most of the time not even realizing until afterwards that something has changed; and there are no big “Aha!” moments, there are just shifts in perspective that gradually (perhaps glacially) take you further towards a realization of who you are, or want to be, or can afford to be.

So while this book is definitely written for a middle school audience—not angsty teenagers but really for 6th and 7th-graders—I am wondering if they are seeing in it what I, as an adult, am seeing in it? Maybe I am being condescending, though—maybe they see it and get it much more easily and clearly than I do! Sometimes our expectations of writing and story interfere with our appreciation of something new or different in structure or feeling, and the middle-schoolers won’t have the predispositions that I do.

I ended up really appreciating this book. You could describe it as a slice of life story, but it’s more than that. Not a lot more, but the distance beyond is what’s important about it. It’s truly “coming of age,” but not with the idea that coming of age has some magic arrival point at which you are finally you. Instead, it shows that even grandfathers are still groping for identity after decades of feeling like they were who they were forever. A significant message in a seemingly innocuous little package.