So, I'm a thirty-five-year-old librarian who had never read this until my family chose it as our annual summer read. I want to say that I should have read it long ago, but I don't think that's true. Now was the right time for me to read this.

I'm discovering that I enjoy richly-described summer stories where children deal with mature situations. That's what I found here. Beautiful, shocking, sweet, evocative, powerful.