Wow. This book is one that girls and boys need today. It was amazing. I loved seeing Mia gain her strength and confidence back from a physically and emotionally difficult situation while making friends and helping her grandma along the way.

An age-appropriate book about inappropriate behavior in the gymnastics world. Mia is fortunate to have caring adults and friends to help her deal with her problems.

Wow! So much going on in this book! Cool cricket science/farming and cooking (yes!), metoo movement, entrepreneurship, and a fun mystery too. The author ties everything together in such a clever way as well. Messner impresses me again and I’m sure will be a hit with my students.

Mia and her family are moving to Vermont to be closer to her grandmother. Gram isn't your typical old lady. In fact, she runs her own business - the business of bugs.

Gram's cricket farm has been struggling. One thing after another seems to be going wrong and Gram and Mia suspect foul play. Mia, aided by her new friends at Launch camp, come up with a plan to help. They create the Cricket Challenge where people are encouraged to try eating crickets and posting to social media. They create a new business plan to enter into the Junior Launch competition.

While Mia is making new friends and trying new things, she struggles with the fear that came with her gymnastics injury, as well as the secret that truly ended her interest in gymnastics.

This book is a great introduction to both women in entrepreneurship and the #metoo movement. Messner always does a wonderful job at bringing real world issues to her texts in a way that supports readers and starts conversation and this book continues that legacy.

With a move to Burlington VT area to be close to Gram who is a cultivating cricket farm, Mia finds herself making new friends at a local summer camps, but not gymnastics. Mia suffered a broken arm at her suburban Boston gymnastics school, and even though she has shelves of trophies and she is healed physically, emotionally she is not. #me too theme tucked in a middle grade plot. Highly readable mystery which offers a positive message about friendship, trust, and not being intimidated.

Loved this story and all the themes of addresses including unwanted attention from adults and how to handle that as a young girl, cricket farming and sustainable diets, engineering and robotics where the girls are the experts, and finding ways to deal with tough situations with the love and support of family and friends.

This is an important story! Read it together or at the same time as your tween and then discuss the super important topic and how Mia can be anybody. This book can open the door for some great discussions.

Kate Messner brings an important, heavy topic to readers woven together with great characters and a little mystery.

There was an issue with my e-arc where some of the sentences were missing, which made it a little difficult to read. Other than that I really enjoyed this book and will definitely recommend it.

This phenomenal MG is not only entertaining but moving as well. It presents an important and timely issue to young audiences in a sensitive and age-appropriate manner. Readers will love the insect recipes and the mystery. Teachers and parents will be able to use this book as a springboard for many meaningful conversations. Highly recommended.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA Children's Books for a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Description
From acclaimed author Kate Messner comes the powerful story of a young girl with the courage to make her voice heard, set against the backdrop of a summertime mystery.

When Mia moves to Vermont the summer after seventh grade, she's recovering from the broken arm she got falling off a balance beam. And packed away in the moving boxes under her clothes and gymnastics trophies is a secret she'd rather forget.

Mia's change in scenery brings day camp, new friends, and time with her beloved grandmother. But Gram is convinced someone is trying to destroy her cricket farm. Is it sabotage or is Gram's thinking impaired from the stroke she suffered months ago? Mia and her friends set out to investigate, but can they uncover the truth in time to save Gram's farm? And will that discovery empower Mia to confront the secret she's been hiding--and find the courage she never knew she had?

In a compelling story rich with friendship, science, and summer fun, a girl finds her voice while navigating the joys and challenges of growing up.

Kate Messner is passionately curious and writes books that encourage kids to wonder, too. Her titles include award-winning picture books like Over and Under the Snow, Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt, and How to Read a Story; novels like Capture the Flag, All the Answers, The Seventh Wish, and Breakout; the Fergus and Zeke easy reader series, and the Ranger in Time historical chapter book series. Kate lives on Lake Champlain with her family and is trying to summit all forty-six Adirondack High Peaks in between book deadlines.

There was a problem with the digital copy, but I soldiered through it. I'm not a huge one overly fond of folks jumping on the bandwagon of the #metoo thing. I also don't think it needs to be shoved in younger kids faces. I grew up in a different world than what we have today in terms of the social norms that are going around in all the social media that's killing the world as we know it. I didn't like that part of the book. It was, however, well written.

I was so excited to be able to read an advanced copy of Chirp and it lived up to all of my expectations. Kate Messner handled a very sensitive topic with grace and made it very approachable to young people. Kate Messner really has a talent for middle grade fiction.

Kate Messner is a master at writing for tweens because, just as kids don’t have a single identity, neither do the books she writes for them. She can write about a heavy, important topic without it feeling burdensome, because that isn’t the book’s only identity. Chirp is an incredibly relevant, sensitive, courageous book that takes on the complex topic of sexual abuse and harassment. I absolutely love the gentle and appropriate way that she handles this topic - with respect for her readers, and connecting them to the #MeToo stories they hear from adults. The main character, Mia, has just moved to Vermont, where her grandmother’s cricket farm is struggling. Grandma raises crickets for food - people food! - so there are a variety of examples throughout the book of how to eat crickets - roasted, ground into flour for baked goods, or included in candy, ice cream, and pizza! This is a highly fascinating topic, especially for kids, and its relevance to sustainability and eco-mindedness is a theme in the book, as Mia works for ways to help her grandma’s business expand and become more efficient. Mia and her new friends also try to solve the mystery of who is sabotaging the cricket farm, and why - the connections to Mia’s own personal battle are absolutely genius. Entrepreneurship, physical training, friendship, corporate sabotage, gymnastics, female empowerment, robotics, competition, social media, and family relationships all play important roles in Mia’s story of learning to find her voice and speak up! There are a lot of moving parts in this book, but I believe that is the point: we are not a single story, a single aspect of our identities. Humans, including kids, are so much more complex, and Kate deftly brings all of Mia’s identities together with compassion, humor, and perfect timing.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury Children's Books, for sharing an advance copy of Chirp by Kate Messner with me. All opinions are my own. This book will be released in February 2020.

During the summer after 7th grade, Mia moves back to Vermont so her parents can help her grandma with her cricket farm (though Mia's mom believes her grandma should sell the business, so she can relax). Mia's mom makes her choose two summer camps to enroll in, one for her mind and one for her body. Mia chooses to go to Launch Camp and Warrior Camp. Between her camp sessions, Mia helps her grandma at the cricket farm and learns that things just don't seem to be going her grandma's way. They're having issues with temperature control, bugs in the feed, and more. Mia quickly realizes that someone is trying to sabotage her grandma's dream and makes it her project at Launch Camp to create a business plan and way to innovate and expand the cricket farm. Mia and her friends start to investigate the mysterious incidents occurring at the farm. Will their discoveries and friendship empower Mia to share the secrets she's been keeping?

I enjoyed this book for several reasons. To start, I love a mystery. This book has just enough of a mystery to pull you in. I became invested in the cricket farm and trying to figure out who was behind the sabotage. Additionally, I liked the message about empowerment and female entrepreneurs. I liked that the two camps that Mia chose might not be considered camps for girls, but both had multiple girls not only attending but excelling at what they were doing. The final thing I liked was Mia finding her voice and sharing with her mom about what happened to her at gymnastics. Mia knew something was wrong, but didn't believe that her voice would be heard or believed. I think it's incredibly important for young readers to know that if something is off or doesn't feel right to them, that they should share those feelings with a trusted adult. While I did enjoy this novel, my digital arc had several missing portions (random parts of sentences and paragraphs just weren't there) which did detract a little from my enjoyment as I wasn't getting the full picture and I had to infer several things.

Kate Messner does a masterful job of writing a main character who overcome certain challenges by connecting with other girls and women and finding strength by speaking up. In this #metoo book girls share experiences through building a business together. The mystery that needs solving along the way adds one more element of fun you the book.

Due to a truly horrible digital ARC, I stopped trying to read this one. I think it will be a good middle grades choice for those that like a come back story with heart and a little mystery.

I really liked this book and was able to read it in a few hours. The incorporation of the different camps and the cricket farm was pretty clever. I also think the fact that the #metoo movement was a part of the story was extremely important and well done. I rarely see middle grade books that discuss serious subjects like sexual harassment and this author did a great job of writing it into this story. The only two things I didn’t like in the book was the fact that a lot of the dialogue was a little too much set up and could feel heavy handed at times. Like there was too much tell and not show. The other issues was more with the formatting of the book (so it may be Netgalley fault and not a issue with the story). There were a lot of words and pages cut off so I needed to use context clues a lot to figure out certain words and what was going on. I still understood the story for the most part, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. Overall though, this was a fun, creative, and important story that I hope many middle schoolers and readers in general will love.

I received this ARC from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

There's so much to love about this book. Mia's family returns to Vermont to help her grandmother who is struggling to keep her cricket farm afloat. Mia's parents think her grandmother should sell but Mia knows how much it means to her and wants to help in any way she can. She ends up at two camps (neither of which she is thrilled about) but through these camps she finds incredible friends and two very different kinds of strength.

It is the strength that is the biggest surprise to Mia, as it's what she feels she lost when she broke her arm at gymnastics. This book puts words and validation to the icky feeling from a situation that just doesn't feel right. It's a must read for so many kids.

This book packs a lot into a hair under 230 pages. I love Mia and her family, especially Gram. I've never been particularly tempted to try crickets but I kind of am now. (Probably the garlic and sea salt, but maybe maple? Probably barbecue.) 

I also love Mia's friends. They're smart and lovely people, and I especially love the way that they all cheer each other on. They're not even competitive or frenemies and it's a good change. 

As could be expected from Kate Messner's books, this is a fun and good story that is an excellent time. (Expect some hard moments and maybe a few tears, but it's all worth it.) Highly recommended.