Those Kids from Fawn Creek
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Every day in Fawn Creek feels exactly the same—until Orchid Mason arrives.
There are twelve kids in the seventh grade at the Fawn Creek school. They've been together all their lives. In this tiny manufacturing town where everyone knows everything about everyone, that's not necessarily a great thing.
There are twelve kids, but thirteen desks. That's because Renni Dean moved to Grand Saintlodge—the next-door town—last year. Renni might have left Fawn Creek, but she still knows their secrets. She's still pulling their strings.
When Orchid Mason arrives and slips gracefully into Renni's desk, the other seventh-graders don't know what to think. Orchid is new and exciting. She was born in New York City and has travelled the world. She has lived in Paris, and she tells them stories of the Eiffel Tower and the Love Lock Bridge. She seems to float. Her dress skims the floor. She wears a flower behind her ear.
Orchid’s arrival is about to upset the tightly knit friendship groups and challenge the hold Renni has over them. Who will claim Orchid Mason? Will she save them? Or will they save her?
Those Kids from Fawn Creek is a delightful story of friendship and fitting in, of truth and lies and the things that matter most from beloved Newbery Medal-winning author Erin Entrada Kelly.
New York Times–bestselling author Erin Entrada Kelly was awarded the Newbery Medal for Hello, Universe and a Newbery Honor for We Dream of Space. She is a professor of children’s literature in the graduate fiction and publishing programs at Rosemont College. She is also the author of The Land of Forgotten Girls, winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; You You Go First, a Spring 2018 Indie Next Pick; Lalani of the Distant SeaMaybe Maybe Marisol Rainey, which she also illustrated.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this uplifting small-town novel about friendship and identity, Newbery winner Entrada Kelly realistically captures the complex hierarchies of middle school. When new student Orchid Mason joins Venezuela-born Mr. Agosto's class one November day, the 12 seventh graders can't help but be excited—Orchid has traveled all over the world, while little changes in Fawn (aka "Yawn") Creek, Louisiana. Ignoring the small cued-white class's well-established social hierarchy and garnering disdain from local mean girls, Orchid gravitates toward introverted Dorothy, who longs to connect with her detached parents, and soft-spoken Greyson, who's struggling with his father's characterization of him as "soft." But while Orchid's stories of life in New York City and Paris enthrall her classmates, her reticence to share much about herself causes her classmates—especially those threatened by Orchid's popularity—to doubt her claims. Told by alternating narrators who each confess to feeling confined by unrealistic expectations and preconceived roles, this contemporary novel, timely in themes of self-acceptance and bullying, builds on the experiences of the author's childhood to create a raw, real exploration of belonging that's also sweetly hopeful. Occasional art by Krampien highlights the setting. Ages 8–12.
