A grieving "twelve-year-old with gumption" plunges herself into a library reading contest--and some local corruption--in this funny, humane middle-grade debut by Meghan P. Browne.
When green-eyed, auburn-haired Maisie McMeans's father died, her mother's heart "exploded into a million-trillion pieces" and she developed a problem with "broken-hearted drinking." Although Maisie fears her mother is "too broken to fix," she agrees to spend the summer with her Aunt Gertie in tiny Heaven, Tex., while her mother attends rehab. Maisie plans a quiet, solitary summer of reading in the air-conditioned library (and winning the Wash-a-Rama reading program). But when she forms a prickly friendship with freckled 14-year-old Walter Wise, her quiet plans are disrupted and her summer shifts into high gear. The two discover a plot hatched by the perfectly coifed and sycophantic mayor, who is married to a descendant of Heaven's founding family. Mayor Taylor wants to build a luxury property on the site of the beloved local springs and simply needs to make an environmental report against any development "disappear." Walt and Maisie intend to stop her. But when Maisie learns a devastating secret about her own life, she decides to get "the heck out of Heaven."
Fans of Dusti Bowling and Dan Gemeinhart will likely find the folksy first-person narrative and energetic, multi-pronged plot in The Edge of Forever satisfying. While Walt's manner of speaking sometimes seems beyond his years ("ever since Granddaddy made up his mind to tell the truth, my branch has been totally, completely, and utterly excised from the trunk"), Maisie's spirited, self-aware voice comes through loud, clear, and sincere. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor