Riot Recommendation: What’s Your Favorite Book About Siblings?
This post is sponsored by Still a Work in Progress by Jo Knowles
In a return to middle-grade fiction, master of perspectives Jo Knowles depicts a younger sibling struggling to maintain his everyday life when his older sister is in crisis.
Noah is just trying to make it through seventh grade. The girls are confusing, the homework is boring, and even his friends are starting to bug him. Not to mention that his older sister, Emma, has been acting pretty strange, even though Noah thought she’d been doing better ever since the Thing They Don’t Talk About. The only place he really feels at peace is in art class, with a block of clay in his hands. As it becomes clear through Emma’s ever-stricter food rules and regulations that she’s not really doing better at all, the normal seventh-grade year Noah was hoping for begins to seem pretty unattainable. In an affecting and realistic novel with bright spots of humor, Jo Knowles captures the complexities of navigating middle school while feeling helpless in the face of a family crisis.
Are there any relationships on Earth that can be more fraught than the one you have with your siblings (the one you have with your parents, probably, but that’s it)? The roller coaster of love (best friends!), hate (she stole my [insert clothing item/love interest/whatever here]), back to love (we’re adults now, let’s struggle together), is universal.
So tell us: what’s your favorite book about siblings? Tell us in the comments, and check back next week for a reading list!
