The list of things that will not change

Rebecca Stead

Book - 2020

Despite her parents' divorce, her father's coming out as gay, and his plans to marry his boyfriend, ten-year-old Bea is reassured by her parents' unconditional love, excited about getting a stepsister, and haunted by something she did last summer at her father's lake house.

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Subjects
Genres
Fiction
Published
New York : Wendy Lamb Books [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Rebecca Stead (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
218 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781101938096
9781101938102
9781101938126
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When Bea's father decides to get married for the second time, this time to another man, she is overjoyed, not only because she loves Jesse, her father's partner, but also because he has a daughter her age, and the thing Bea wants most in the world is a sister. This tale of 10-year-old Bea is narrated by her 12-year-old self, who often flashes back to earlier episodes of her life, brilliantly depicting the nonlinear storytelling mechanics of a tween mind. Indeed, Stead's greatest strength may be her understanding of the middle-grade psyche. Her work shows great respect for the complexity of children's feelings, and this remarkable book is, more than anything, about feelings. As Bea prepares for her father's wedding, attempts to forge a connection with her future sister, and worries over her single mother, she meets intermittently with a therapist, who guides Bea in self-reflective exercises describing what emotions feel like (a narrative tool used frequently, to great effect) and helps her unearth her own terrible secret, which lands in a hard-hitting twist ending. So much is tackled in this slim volume: a courteous divorce, Bea's incidental case of eczema, friendship, mental health, sisterhood, and a beautiful model of gay marriage in the face of adversity. An emotional character journey from a middle-grade master. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It's been almost five years since Newbery medalist Stead's last solo novel, and adoration of her work is at the top of the list of things that will not change.--Ronny Khuri Copyright 2020 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

When eight-year-old Bea's father comes out as gay, her divorcing parents give her a notebook containing "The List of Things That Will Not Change," an accounting that helps the girl navigate her shifting family landscape. Two years later, Bea is thrilled when her restaurateur dad and his adored boyfriend, Jesse, announce their engagement; the only child has always wanted a sister, and she can't wait to welcome Jesse's daughter, Sonia, into the family. But Sonia, who lives in California, has complicated feelings about the situation that surface when she arrives in New York City. It's one of many interpersonal challenges that deeply sensitive Bea--an eczema sufferer who wears her heart on her sleeve--faces that year, contributing to growing feelings of guilt and worry. Newbery Medalist Stead's knack for authentic tween voices ("I didn't think I could live through that moment of everyone looking at me") shines through in a first-person narration that explores Bea's rich inner life as she learns, with help, to manage her anxiety. Bea's interactions with her loving community convey particularly well-drawn dynamics that support themes of building resilience and savoring joy; together, these insightful moments layer into an affecting story of significant middle grade change. Ages 8--12. Agent: Faye Bender, the Book Group. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 5--8--When 12-year-old Bea's parents first divorced two years ago, they gave her a green notebook in which they had started a list of Things That Will Not Change, with numbers one and two being "Mom loves you more than anything, always," and "Dad loves you more than anything, always." Bea takes comfort in adding to her list; it helps her understand number six: "We are still a family, but in a different way." When Bea's dad and his partner, Jesse, first announce they're getting married, Bea is thrilled--she loves Jesse, and she will finally have a real sister once they're married. Jesse's daughter, Sonia, lives across the country in California, and Bea is anxious that Sonia isn't as thrilled as she is about the prospect of new family members. Bea sees a supportive therapist, Miriam, who assists her with her anxiety, her guilt over how she reacts to stressful situations, and other obstacles she encounters daily. When Sonia comes to New York for a visit, Bea assumes that Sonia doesn't want her to be part of their new blended family. Stead masterfully captures the trials and tribulations both the girls are navigating. As the wedding planning ramps up, so do Bea's anxiety and eczema, and the potential disaster Bea may have caused by secretly inviting Jesse's estranged brother, Mission, to the wedding. Readers' heartstrings will be tugged as the wedding isn't all sunshine and happiness, and family dynamics are shown to be both powerful but sometimes flawed. VERDICT The angst and worries that middle grade readers experience are brought to life through Bea's authentic voice in this must-read title.--Michele Shaw, Quail Run Elementary School, San Ramon, CA

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review

From the outside it appears that Bea lives a charmed life. She has loving (albeit divorced) parents; an involved extended family; a kindly, funny teacher; a loyal best friend; a dog and a cat; and a wise therapist. Even situations involving life changes, such as her gay fathers upcoming wedding and the prospect of a new stepsister, seem to be curiously unfraught. But with Steads fiction (When You Reach Me, rev. 7/09; Goodbye Stranger, rev. 7/15), appearances are always deceiving. It turns out that Beas upbeat spin on life is papering over some major anxieties and some serious problems with anger management. Bea is keeping two secrets. She lets us in on one of them, a piece of well-meaning interference in the wedding plans that turns out to be a disaster. The other secret, hidden in plain sight but only revealed at the climax, involves deliberately causing harm to another person. The strength of this novel lies in Steads authentic, respectful, low-key approach to the emotional life of a ten-year-old as recalled from the perspective of her slightly older self (Bea is twelve when she tells the story: a story about me, but a different one, a person who doesnt exist anymore). Difficulties with spelling, the pleasures of gummy bears, the pain of eczema, the ability to sense adult tensionwe are fully present with Bea, in the rich, crisply rendered details and in her distinctive voice. Sarah Ellis March/April 2020 p.91(c) Copyright 2020. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Bea, 12, reflects on life since her parents' divorce when she was 8.Bea, who is white, tells her story in a direct, conversational tone, with age-appropriate insights. Mostly she describes interactions with family members near and far, including her parents and her father's partner, the aunt, uncle, and cousins with whom she and her parents spend an annual two-week summer vacation, and the new sister by marriage whose visit she eagerly anticipates. Glimpses of her school experiences focus on frustrations or antagonisms, like her struggle with spelling or the times that she allows her anger to spill out and cause (minor) injury to others. Stead packs in plenty of issuesdivorce, therapy, a gay parent, homophobia, and a painful case of eczemabut her prose never descends to moralizing or moaning. Instead, Bea's authentic, accessible voice and smooth interweaving of anecdotes keep the tone relatively light and make for a sometimes-amusing, sometimes-poignant exploration of realistic contemporary experiences and concerns. The acknowledgements that not every problem can be solved and that doing a bad thing does not necessarily make someone a bad person will reassure readers that they too can find balance and comfort in complicated circumstances. Supported by multidimensional, sympathetic family and friends, Bea ultimately finds that her list of certainties provides the necessary foundation for personal growthand change.Uplifting without sentimentality, timely not trendy, and utterly engaging. (Fiction. 8-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Angelica  The summer I turned ten, my cousin Angelica fell from the sleeping loft at our family's lake cabin. Uncle Frank says her head missed the woodstove by four inches.  She hit the floor with a bad sound, a whump. Then we didn't hear anything. No crying. No yelling. Nothing.  Until, finally, there was the sound of Angelica trying to breathe.  Dad got to her first. Aunt Ess, Angelica's mom, called from her room. "What was that? Dan? What was that?"  He answered, "It's Angelica--she fell, but she's okay. She got the wind knocked out of her, but I think she's okay."  From the loft, I saw Angelica sit up, slowly. Dad was rubbing her back in circles. Uncle Frank and Aunt Ess came crashing in from their bedroom, and then Angelica started crying these short, jagged cries.  The next morning, Uncle Frank said that if her head had hit the woodstove, Angelica could have died. By that time, she looked normal. She was wearing her turquoise two-piece bathing suit and chewing her eggs with her lips sealed tight. No bruises, even--she landed on her back, Dad said, which is what knocked her wind out.  That summer, my parents had been divorced for two years already, but I still thought about when Mom used to come to the lake cabin with us. I could picture her red bathing suit on the clothesline. I remembered which end of the table she sat at for dinner. I remembered her, sitting on the dock with Aunt Ess, talking.    Mom and Dad told me about the divorce at a "family meeting." I had just turned eight. We'd never had a family meeting before. I sat on the couch, between them. They didn't look happy, and I suddenly got worried that something was wrong with our cat, Red. That they were going to tell me he was dying. A boy in my class that year had a cat who died. But that wasn't it.  Dad put his arm around me and said that some big things were going to change. Mom squeezed my hand. Then Dad said they were getting divorced. Soon he was going to move out of our apartment, into a different one.  I said, "But I'm staying here, right?" I looked at Mom.  Dad said I was going to have two homes, and two rooms, instead of one. I was going to live in both places.  I could think of only one person in my class whose parents were divorced: Carolyn Shattuck. Carolyn had a navy-blue sweatshirt with one big pocket in front. Until the family meeting, I had wanted one just like it.  I said, "What about Red?"  Mom said Red would be staying with her. "With us--you and me."  You and me. That made me feel awful. Because back then I couldn't think of Mom and me without Dad.  Dad said, "Things are changing, Bea. But there's still a lot you can count on. Okay? Things that won't ever change."  This was when they gave me the green spiral notebook and the green pen. (My favorite color is green.) In the notebook, they had made a list. The list was called Things That Will Not Change.  I started reading:   1. Mom loves you more than anything, always.  2. Dad loves you more than anything, always.   I skipped to the end, uncapped the green pen, and wrote:   7. Red will stay with me and Mom.   I said, "I want my rainbow to stay here, too. Over my bed." Dad painted that rainbow, right on the wall, when I was really little.  Mom said, "Yes, of course, sweetie. Your rainbow will stay right where it is."  I wrote that down, too. Number 8.    Dad moved into a different apartment a month later.  I go back and forth between them.  Here's how it works:    MONDAY is a DAD day. TUESDAY is a MOM day. WEDNESDAY is a DAD day.  THURSDAY is a MOM day.  FRIDAY is part of THE WEEKEND.  THE WEEKEND is FRIDAY and SATURDAY.  THE WEEKEND alternates. SUNDAY is SUNDAY.  SUNDAY is its OWN DAY.  SUNDAY alternates.   Before Dad moved out, I thought of the weekend as Saturday and Sunday. Now I think of the weekend as Friday and Saturday. And I think of Sunday as SUNDAY.  Right after the family meeting, I found Red asleep in the laundry basket and carried him to my room, where I opened my new notebook. I looked at the list of Things That Will Not Change. My parents had written:   1. Mom loves you more than anything, always. 2. Dad loves you more than anything, always.  3. Mom and Dad love each other, but in a different way.  4. You will always have a home with each of us.  5. Your homes will never be far apart.  6. We are still a family, but in a different way.   After that, I carried the green spiral notebook everywhere. I asked a lot of questions. I used the green pen.   Our first summer at the lake cabin without Mom, there were Mom-shaped reminders everywhere, like her blue Sorry! pieces and the chipped yellow bowl she always used for tomato salad. The Mom-reminders were all over the place, but I was the only one who saw them.  That summer, Dad explained to everyone at the cabin--Uncle Frank and Aunt Ess, and my cousins, James, Angelica, and Jojo--that he is gay. I already knew. My parents had told me at the one and only family meeting, when they gave me the notebook.  "Will you be gay forever now?" I asked Dad at the meeting.  Yes, he told me. He would always be attracted to some men the same way that some men were attracted to some women. It's the way he's felt since he was little. I uncapped my green pen and wrote it down right away on the list of Things That Will Not Change. It's number nine: Dad is gay.   After Dad explained about being gay to everyone at the lake cabin, he asked if anyone had questions. No one did. Then Dad and Uncle Frank walked down to the dock and sat with their feet in the water. I watched from the porch, where I was sitting on the edge of Uncle Frank's favorite chair. After a while, they stood up and jumped in the lake. They were splashing each other like little kids, laughing. I remember being surprised, because Uncle Frank never swims. He always says the water in that lake is too cold. Most of the time, he just sits on the porch, in his chair, in the sun.  "So, you live with your mom now?" my cousin James asked me that night in the sleeping loft. James is four years older than I am. I was eight that first summer without Mom, so he was twelve.  I explained to him about the days of the week. When I was done, we got into our beds, and Angelica tickled my arm for a while. (Usually, I tickled her arm, and then she would say she was too tired to do mine.)  Right around then, James started calling me "Ping-Pong."  He had really weird nicknames for his little sisters--he called Angelica "BD," which was for "bottom drawer," because she'd once stepped into an open dresser drawer to reach something on a shelf and fallen over, cutting her lip. And James called Jojo "Speaker," short for "speakerphone," because when she was a baby she used to cry if she heard Uncle Frank's voice but couldn't see him anywhere. The names were kind of mean, but I had secretly wanted a James nickname for a long time.  I couldn't remember doing anything Ping-Pong-related that James might be making fun of me for, but I didn't care. I actually liked the name Ping-Pong, until Aunt Ess heard him down at our dock and told him to march himself up to the porch so they could "have a chat."  "Aunt Ess, I don't mind it!" I called after them. But she ignored me.  "You mean you like being a Ping-Pong ball?" Angelica said. Angelica is a year and a half older than me. We were trying to teach Jojo, even though she was only five, to play volleyball on the little beach where we kept the boats pulled up next to our dock. Now Angelica was tapping the dirty volleyball with the tips of her fingers. She had it trapped between a hip and an elbow.  "What?" I felt my eyes narrowing. I hated it when I didn't understand something right away.  "You go back and forth, right? From your mom's to your dad's? Like a Ping-Pong ball." She smiled.  I was on top of her in three steps. First, I yanked her ponytail, and then I smacked that ball off her hip, down to the dirt.  "Bea!" Aunt Ess shouted down from the porch. I guess she'd been yelling at James and watching over us at the same time.  Angelica just stood there smiling.  I stomped to the water and floated on my back with my ears under the water so that I couldn't hear. Angelica was stuck waiting for me to get out because we were swim buddies. James didn't call me Ping-Pong again. Or anything else.   When my parents were together, two weeks at the lake with my cousins was never enough for me. After the divorce, it felt about a week too long.  It felt too long the summer I was eight, when my cousin Jojo was finally old enough to stay up and play Sorry! with us after dinner. Green is Jojo's favorite color, too, so I let her have my pieces, and I took Mom's blue ones.  It felt too long the summer I was nine. That was the summer the chipped yellow bowl broke. I don't know how it happened; I just saw the pieces in the garbage. It felt especially too long the summer I was ten. The summer Angelica fell. When those two weeks were finally over, I was in the back seat of our car even before Rocco, our dog, could hurl himself in there. And Rocco loves the car.   News   I like to dance. Not "dance" dance, with mirrors and leotards, but secret dancing in my room with my earbuds in. I don't know how it looks, but I know how it feels. It feels like I know exactly what to do. I know when to turn or sidestep, when to take it easy and when to go a little crazy. It doesn't matter whether I'm at my mom's or at my dad's. I keep my eyes closed, and I'm wherever I'm supposed to be. But when I'm dancing, I'd rather be at my dad's, because my mom doesn't believe in bedroom-door locks. And she has a way of flinging my door open as if she's trying to catch me at something. "Bea, you have a fever. You should be resting."  "Mom!" I was breathing hard from dancing.  "What?"  "Privacy?"  She made a face. That's what Mom thinks of privacy.  "Dad just called," Mom said. "Sheila's on her way."  This was at the beginning of fifth grade, when I was ten. Right after Jesse moved in with Dad and me.  This is all part of the story about the sound of corn growing. Believe it or not.    I'd stayed home sick, so my babysitter, Sheila, was picking me up from Mom's apartment, instead of at school. Sheila picked me up on my "Dad days"--Mondays and Wednesdays and every other Friday. She also used to clean Dad's apartment. And she walked our dog, Rocco.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Friday, Mom picked me up at school. Mom cleans our apartment herself because she doesn't believe in paying someone else to pick up your mess. Or your dog's.  Dad doesn't believe in ten-year-olds going to PG-13 movies, and Mom doesn't believe in cereal with more than three grams of sugar per serving. Dad doesn't believe in curse words, and Mom doesn't believe in going to school with a temperature above 98.6.  Dad thinks anything below 100 is fine.  Mom doesn't believe in wasting money, but Dad says it's fine to splurge once in a while. When he bought me a puffy purple swivel chair for my room at his apartment, Mom muttered about it, and I went online and found out it cost almost 200 dollars, and after that I felt weird.  Dad believes in allowance for chores. Mom believes in free allowance and doing chores for nothing. But Dad's allowance is a dollar higher. Confused? Welcome to my life.  Sometimes when I'm dancing at Dad's with the door locked tight, I slam myself into that puffy purple swivel chair and just spin. Everything is a blur, and my feet kick off the floor, shooting me around, and around, and around.  At Mom's, I do my spinning on my feet, with my arms stretched out.    The doorbell rang, and I heard Mom let Sheila in. My temperature was only 99.3. Even after a lot of dancing, I couldn't get it up to Dad-sick, so I knew I was going to school the next day. Thursday. Spelling-test day. I looked on my desk for my word sheet.  I picked up my backpack and started throwing stuff in: word sheet, math workbook, planner, colonial-breakfast folder (with butter recipe), and the only barrette I had that actually stayed in my hair. Most of them fall straight down.  Sheila knocked on my bedroom door, and I yelled "Come!" which is what Captain Picard always says on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sheila and I used to watch that show together at Dad's. (Eventually, we streamed all seven seasons. That's a lot of Star Trek.)  Anyone would like Sheila--she has pink glasses and big hair, and she wears a lot of bracelets. And cowboy boots, even in summertime.  "You're sick?" Sheila said.  "Mom-sick."  She nodded. Sheila got it, even though her parents were never divorced. They stayed married until they died.  "Got your medicine?" Sheila said.  "Yep." I patted my bag.  "Shall I set a course for Ninety-Ninth Street, Captain?"  I tugged down the front of my shirt with both hands. "Make it so!" Sheila was the one who noticed that Captain Picard was always tugging on his uniform, pulling it down in front like he was trying to cover his stomach. She heard the actor being interviewed on TV, and he said it was because they made the costumes a little too short.  I hugged Mom goodbye. "I'll see you after school tomorrow," she said, squeezing me. My face was mushed against her, so one ear heard the regular way, and the other one heard through her body. When we let go, I saw her see the rash on my neck, which itched. "Got your medicine?"  "Yes!" I hated being asked things twice. Even by two different people. "Don't shout at me, Bea." "I'm not."  And Sheila said, "Let's go, Captain." Excerpted from The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.