Deliver Us From Normal by Kate KliseScholastic, 2005

Charles Harrisong lives in Normal, Illinois, and feels like his family is weird beyond helping. It’s not even that his family is so weird, although his younger siblings can be loud, his mom is sometimes embarrassing, and his older sister is independent and quirky. It’s more that Charles is acutely aware of what lies behind everyday interactions: he’s very good at reading the subtexts of conversations and picking out the tensions that surface in people’s relationships with one another. And in part because he’s hyper-aware of all the social nuances of school and home and the world-in-general, he’s anxious, always seeing every situation as a possibility for embarrassment. Things start to change, though, when his family leaves Normal (quite suddenly) and moves elsewhere. This is a fast-paced and charming novel, and one that doesn’t talk down to its readers. I like that Charles’s parents do their own thing, and are accepting of the hugely varying personalities of their five kids; I also like that Klise doesn’t turn this into a stereotypical “problem novel” where everything is neatly resolved at the end.