FINISHED:
O'Reilly, Jane. (2017). The Notations of Cooper Cameron. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda/Lerner.

[Cooper Cameron (no indication of race is conveyed) just finished 5^th grade, and is spending the summer with his mother and older sister at a house on the lake where his grandfather died 2 years earlier – an incident for which Cooper feels responsible, and which seems to have triggered in him some obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) ticks.  With a verbally abusive father out of the way for most of the summer, Cooper, who frequently jots down life lessons in a notebook, learns how to make ice cream for an elderly neighbor and is hired by a nice kid in town to tie fishing lures, which help to keep “That Boy” – his name for the OCD side of himself who causes him to do things in groups of three – at bay.  The awful behavior of his father and the things that he says about Cooper are palpably biting, and there’s a poignancy to Cooper’s continually trying to ward off “That Boy” when he begins to feel his OCD being triggered by a stressful situation.  Though a subplot involving a series of thefts in town feels hyped and then unsatisfyingly resolved, and there seem to be lapses in time throughout the novel, Cooper’s realization that not everything is his fault and sometimes there is nothing he can do to help is a powerfully learned message.]

STARTED:
Lee, Mackenzi. (2017). The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue. New York: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins.

[.]

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