So funny! But definitely quirky. The narrator and main protagonist is 12.5 year old Aristotle Thibodeau who is writing this novel as we are reading it. She received "How to Write a Novel" as a gift from her mother Diane and she diligently works through the various exercises and parts of a book. She has plenty of material! She does seem a little precocious for 12.5 - I would believe 14 better, but that is part of her charm. Her 8 yr. old brother Max is a bit of a spaz -- he has all sorts of issues, but really, all 3 of them do since they have continued to be a modified family after the death of Aris' father Joe when she was 4 and Max was a "bun in the oven." Now they live in Kanuga, GA where Diane's parents are with some close scrutiny from the small town, but a surprising amount of leeway to be the completely unconventional family they are. Both kids call their Mom Diane - she is an English adjunct at Kanuga College - until she loses her job for helping a student who has been arrested. Plus there is the faith pledge and the restrictions on swearing and other unChristian behavior. Penn is another unusual character -he is the kids' PMI (positive male influence) and Aris is intent on making her novel a romance between Penn and her mother. Aris' maturity and parent-figure role is hilarious, though a touch heart-breaking for how seriously she takes it and how easily Diane acquiesces to giving Aris way too much responsibility. Many of the events could only happen in a novel, they are so unbelievable, but Aris has a talent for capturing all of it, even the parts that are unflattering to her like her long-distance boyfriend Billy dumping her and her act of reading her mother's journals and then sending them out to random people who have purchased books from Diane when she did a recent purge. Funny stuff! It is a bit of a coming of age story too - despite Aris' maturity, she learns some of her own limitations and also some of the ugliness of the world and some eye-opening truth about her father. One of those well-written, light-feeling, but heavy-topic books that remind you how fun reading is. ( )

I'm just a little tired of precocious 12 year olds. The premise is clever and the stories told by Charles and by Aris's mother Diane, via the writing their characters do, were interesting. Aris (short for Aristotle) herself, meh. But, overall, I liked the book, as in "it was fine/ok", just didn't love it. Once again, Kirkus Reviews and I part company. ( )

For me, this book started out too cutesy (but not cute) and contrived.. The 12.5-year old first person protagonist is going to write a novel in 30 days with the help of an instructional book. Initially she seemed too adult while her mother seemed too childish, but the child did start seeming more her age. And used footnotes to explain emoticons.

There is the cliché of a missing parent. There is the obligatory child abuse, although the book isn't mainly about that. Fortunately, there is not a child with a fatal disease – that would have made this the trifecta of YA literature. There is a somewhat interesting ghost doing ghostly things. The pre-teen angst wasn't even very angsty.

A kindergarten teacher says, “I want to marry Max.” That would be okay except that Max is not her boyfriend, he is one of the kindergartners. Rather unsettling.

Also unfortunately, there isn't a plot, at least not much of one.

Good ol' mom tries to sneak tofu corn dogs instead of meat corn dogs into hot dog buns. Corn dogs, tofu or meat, don't go into hot hot buns – that's the whole point of a corn dog.

I did like the quote, “Except for the ten-foot statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who sits on a horse in front of the courthouse, you would never know that racism ever existed in Kanuga.”

While mildly entertaining in spots, this is a book that feels like it tried too hard, and it shows.

I was given an advance copy of this book for review, and the quote may have changed in the published edition. ( )