This is a good young adult read. I think it will appeal significantly to girls. It is a verse novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children's for the ARC! 4 out of 5 stars, I want nothing more than to give Alma a hug.

I had some reading difficulties with this, due to the medium I had to read it on (not available for Kindle, basically had to NetGalley Shelf it, and I could not enlarge the text) so I faced what felt like a fair amount of eye strain. This made reading the book more difficult but I did try to power through for Alma!

She's so very much a kid. She's struggling with her family-- or more accurately, they're struggling, and she's trying to cope. She has her friends, her favorite spots in the City, and a mental health professional she sees. Her relationships with her friends are as varied, messy, and difficult as many relationships of the type you'd have in middle school. Many of them too, either face their own issues, or discuss her own with ideas of how to try to "fix" her. They all have much to learn-- they're young, after all, still learning about other people, and struggling so much with their own problems.

Alma's relationships with her parents and grandparents too shine-- they're important people in her life, and she often thinks about them, despite their physical presence being distant or away. This book felt increasingly personal with them, twisting in just the right spots with the complexity of familial relations.

CWs include: racism, period-typical homophobia, prejudice against drug users.