CASTING APRIL

Twelve-year-old April Xue has a passion for acting, so she’s crushed when she auditions for her middle school play but doesn’t land a part due to her disability.

April, who has bilateral vocal cord paralysis, wears a tracheostomy tube that allows her to breathe. One day, she overhears director Ms. Rooney discussing her in the teachers’ lounge. Ms. Rooney says April shouldn’t be on stage—the tube is too loud, and it might fall out. April becomes determined to get what’s rightfully hers. She lies to her family, saying she’s gotten the lead role; in reality, she’s a stage assistant, but she plots to prove she’s a better actor than the actual lead, Zahra Khan. Zahra and April grow close even as April’s new theater community pulls her away from her best friend, Ruby Zhang. The novel details how a play goes from rehearsal to opening night. April is a well-drawn character who’s ambitious and talented. She deals with periodic ableism, but she rejects the label brave: “Simply breathing the same way she had always breathed—that wasn’t brave. That was just the way she lived.” She later discovers that Ms. Rooney’s reasons for underestimating her may have been more complicated than they at first seemed. April’s close-knit Chinese American family and community are well-observed, and she is, refreshingly, allowed to be cutthroat and a realistically bad friend who experiences growth over the course of the story.

An appealing celebration of theater kid passion.