What I Believe: A Novel - Hardcover

NORMA FOX MAZER is an award-winning novelist and a faculty member for the Vermont College MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults Program. Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Christopher Award, an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, a National Book Award nomination, and other prestigious honors. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

Gr. 5-8. Composed in a variety of poetic and narrative verse forms, this describes a middle-school girl's reaction to her family's financial fall. Vicki Marnet's father, laid off almost two years ago, is profoundly depressed. Crippling debt forces the family to sell their home and move from an upper-middle-class suburb to a cramped apartment in the city. While Vicki's mother and older brothers try to make the best of it, Vicki struggles to master the dramatic changes in her life. Although a venturesome work and certainly readable, form tends to trump function here: the verse upstages the story in parts and contributes to Vicki's voice sounding alternately babyish and sage. The book's blurb highlights a "terrible" thing she's done to cope with her difficulties; however, this action proves anticlimactic. The significant decline in circumstance that Vicki experiences with her family is the real heart of the story, and that is what will touch readers, especially those who have lived through that particular agony themselves. Holly Koelling
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