A Starred Review in Kirkus for Pamela Erens’ Matasha

Read it in all its glory:

It’s a life-changing year for a sixth grader on the threshold of puberty in 1970s Chicago.

The only child of affluent Jewish parents, Matasha, 11, is a budding novelist. She’s also tiny. Although her precocity and slight stature have targeted her for bullying at her private school, she fears and resists the daily growth-hormone injections her doctor proposes. She clings to Jean, her only friend, but their fraying friendship breaks after Matasha, whose imagination has fixated on a missing boy from their neighborhood, pressures her into searching for his body. When Jean turns on her, Matasha’s loneliness deepens; bullying induces self-lacerating shame, but she survives. In the grim-faced photo of the Vietnamese girl her mother wants to adopt, Matasha fears a potential bully, then feels guilty when her attorney father dismisses the project. It’s a cold household: her father rarely home; her mother self-absorbed; their Polish housekeeper kind but distant. Although family dysfunction leads Matasha to a shocking discovery, her parents’ emotional disengagement has a freeing upside: It begets agency, if she has the courage to choose it and keep writing. Lauded author Erens’ middle-grade debut unfolds at a steady, measured pace, a successful stylistic departure from prevailing trends toward dialogue-heavy, present-tense narration. Matasha’s journey captures in rich, pellucid detail the experiments, missteps, humiliations, and hard-won victories that will form her adult self.

Beautifully renders the slow-motion alchemy of growing up; mesmerizing and memorable. (Fiction. 10-14)