THE LAST BEST DAYS OF SUMMER

Lucy’s last-week-of-August visits to her grandmother Luz, a potter, at the lake have long been a highlight of her summers. Before going this year, though, she has spent her days with Megan, who’s obsessed with achieving middle-school popularity in the fall, and Eddie, a special-needs boy whom she has been tutoring and who will not be an asset in the popularity hunt. When she arrives at the lake, she sees that her grandmother is becoming forgetful and showing other signs of aging; this is when 12-year-old Lucy asks to be called Luz herself, and she begins to understand that independence and leaving childhood behind carry responsibilities. In a credibility-stretching plot twist, Eddie miraculously manages to make his way to the lake cottage to join her. By observing her grandmother’s way of coping with Eddie and her acceptance and enjoyment of his engaging personality, Lucy sees ways to manage her many upcoming changes. Like the pottery wheel’s demands for centering, the events will require Lucy to find her own center. Engaging and thoughtful, if a trifle overdetermined. (Fiction. 8-12)