Publisher's Weekly Review
After living with four families, Indian American Pavi Sharma, 12, regards herself as a foster care expert. She has developed a business helping foster kids from her former shelter adjust to new homes, teaching her clients how to greet their new family (using "Front Door Face") and collecting Hot Cheetos and school supplies as payment. But Pavi's meticulously ordered life is upended when she meets Meridee, a small girl who is days away from being placed with Pavi's neglectful first foster family. Pavi prefers to keep her business separate from her current life with her nurturing foster mother and her kind foster brother Hamilton, who is Pavi's age. But remembering with visceral fear the vicious dog fights that took place in the backyard, Pavi decides to use her knowledge of the foster care system to prevent what she is sure will be a disastrous placement, reluctantly enlisting the help of her client Santos, Hamilton, and Hamilton's pal Piper. Despite the heavy subject matter, debut author Farr keeps the story moving swiftly, skillfully weaving in moments of tension that allow her diverse cast of flawed yet sympathetic characters to shine. Ages 8-12. Agent: Melissa Edwards, Stonesong. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Twelve-year-old Pavi Sharma, who has bounced from foster home to foster home, has become a small-business owner of sorts: For a fee (Hot Cheetos), she teaches other foster children what she has learned.When she learns that 5-year-old Meridee is to be placed in Pavi's traumatic first foster home, she pulls together a ragtag gangher foster mother's biological son, Hamilton; his best friend, Piper; and Santos, a formidable eighth grader who is also a foster childin order to save Meridee from Pavi's fate. Pavi reads like a standard-issue plucky and quirky (she likes Cheetos and stationery) middle-grade heroine. She is Indian American, but she has no real connection to her cultural background even though she lived with her troubled, Hindi-speaking mother till she was 9. Indeed, Marjorie, Pavi's current foster mother, makes an effort to learn to make "Indian food," including a "few types of curries" and "treats like samosas and biryani," but Pavi is actively incurious. Whether this is due to trauma or not, the failure of the narrative to flesh out her background leaves readers with a flattened, generic sense of India and its cultures. The book includes a fun subplot involving Piper's YouTube beauty channel and Hamilton's participation in a goth makeup tutorial. But readers will want to know more about Pavi's past and her place in the world, beyond just being a foster child. Meridee and Santos are children of color, reflecting foster-child demographics, while Marjorie, Hamilton, and Piper are white.In divorcing this protagonist of color from her background, this novel misses the mark. (Fiction. 8-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A bit of a loner, Pavi runs her own clandestine business, helping less experienced foster kids learn the ropes. Actually, she would do that even if her clients didn't pay her with Hot Cheetos and school supplies. When she meets Meridee, an African American kindergartner who's about to be placed in the foster home where Pavi was traumatized four years earlier, this seventh-grader switches from coaching into action. She snoops through files at the agency, spies on her former foster home, and reluctantly accepts help from her supportive foster brother and her few friends. In her first novel, Farr places a complex main character in a challenging situation. Smart, perceptive, and prickly, Pavi may be enigmatic to her classmates, but to readers, she comes across as an empathetic girl who has learned from her foster care experiences that it's especially hard to find forever families for black and brown kids. Her story is well imagined and the pacing is good, but it's Pavi's convincing first-person narration that gives this chapter book its momentum and its undeniable appeal.--Carolyn Phelan Copyright 2010 Booklist
