  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 04/01/2015 Gr 4–6—Eleven-year-old Ivy Blake has spent most of a wonderful year with the Evers family. She loves Mom, Dad, Grammy, and especially her best friend, Prairie, and she knows that they love her too, but she can't quite feel like she belongs with them. When her mother asks Ivy to come back to live with her, the girl is conflicted but decides to go. Living with her mother again isn't easy—it means a new school, conflicting loyalties, borderline neglect, and the constant strain of her mother's negative outlook and dangerously uncertain temper. Ivy copes and creates through her sketchbook; drawing and writing about her days, the people she loves, and her dreams of making movies. Having dealt with a lot of tough situations in her short life, Ivy is mature and self-aware, but also realistically confused and emotionally awkward. As the title suggests, Ivy's character development is the core of the story, and its strength is Ivy's need to find her own identity and figure her problems out herself. Even the people who love her dearly and believe in her can't give her the answers—she has to find out for herself who she is and who she wants to be. With the exception of Ivy's mother, who is difficult but not a caricature, the people in Ivy's world are almost impossibly warm, intuitive, creative, and kind. This leaves the ending more in the realm of wish fulfillment than harsh reality, but Ivy's insistence on relying on herself ensures that readers will feel that she's earned it. Like Anne of Green Gables and many other neglected creative girls before her, Ivy is irresistible, and readers will be rooting for her all the way. VERDICT A thoughtful and sweet story about finding the family you need in order to be your best self.—Katya Schapiro, Brooklyn Public Library - Copyright 2015 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Booklist - 05/15/2015 In this companion novel to Prairie Evers (2012), Prairie’s best friend and foster sister, Ivy, is unexpectedly and unhappily reclaimed by her mother. Leaving the Evers home, where she has been loved and supported, Ivy is fortunate to find the adult support of her fifth-grade teacher at her new school. Ivy’s interest in movie making, however, is how she builds a new self-identity. When her mother, not surprisingly, proves unfit and unwilling as a parent after all, Ivy is placed in foster care with a woman who happens to be her new teacher’s friend, another roll of life’s dice that yields good emotional fortune. Airgood’s characters are multilayered and compelling, and Ivy’s story of triumph offers realistic hope and optimism. While Ivy and Prairie struggle with their now long-distance friendship, they each make new friends, find that they are able to combine alliances, and enjoy Ivy’s unexpected future. Hand to fans of the quiet, resilient, and realistic heroes in Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising (2000) or lovers of the novels of Eva Ibbotson. - Copyright 2015 Booklist. Loading...
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