Nine-year-old Ida B. Applewood adores her parents, and her best friends are the apple trees in her family’s Wisconsin orchards. A good heart-to-heart with the trees usually leaves her feeling fine. But one day the trees warn that change is coming, and not long after, Ida B.’s mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Homeschooled since kindergarten, Ida B. is dismayed when she’s sent to public school because her mother is too sick to teach her. Then her parents must sell some of the orchard land—and her beloved trees—in order to pay medical bills. Katherine Hannigan’s smart, sensitive, funny protagonist is wise beyond her years, but still very much a child—one who has been so well loved and cared for that she bears both the gift and burden of never having learned before that the universe is not constant. It’s a shift she isn’t prepared for. Unwilling to forgive her parents for what she sees as one betrayal after another, Ida B. closes her heart. She shuts everyone out, only to discover that causing pain in others is worse than anything she has endured. Ida B.’s loving parents (who exhibit realistic frustration and anger at Ida B.’s behavior) and her terrific fourth-grade teacher give her the time and space she needs to figure out where things went wrong and how to begin to make them right again. Hannigan’s quiet story hums with lyrical descriptions of the natural world, and of human nature, too. (Ages 9–11)

Who is Ida B. Applewood? She is a fourth grader like no other, living a life like no other, with a voice like no other, and her story will resonate long after you have put this book down. How does Ida B cope when outside forces -- life, really -- attempt to derail her and her family and her future? She enters her Black Period, and it is not pretty. But then, with the help of a patient teacher, a loyal cat and dog, her beloved apple trees, and parents who believe in the same things she does (even if they sometimes act as though they don't), the resilience that is the very essence of Ida B triumph...and Ida B. Applewood takes the hand that is extended and starts to grow up.

This first novel is both very funny and extraordinarily moving, and it introduces two shining stars -- Katherine Hannigan and Ida B. Applewood.