Breaking into Sunlight
by John Cochran
Middle School    Algonquin    304 pp.
6/24    9781523527298    $17.99
e-book ed.  9781523529049    $9.99

Seventh grader Reese Buck has never told his best friends, Tony and Ryan, about his father’s drug addiction problems; he doesn’t want to be ostracized or seen as “that kid everyone felt sorry for.” When Reese finds his father unconscious on the bathroom floor after a near-fatal overdose, his mother has finally had enough. She takes Reese to live, reluctantly, in a trailer on the farm of “the church lady,” Mrs. Smith, and her grandchildren: thirteen-year-old Meg and fifteen-year-old Charlie, who has Down syndrome. Cochran ably constructs a sensitive portrayal of a self-involved, if well-meaning, adolescent who thinks he knows what’s right and his tentative steps toward letting other people in. The healing power of community is at work here, as Meg and Charlie help in their own ways, and Tony and Ryan, absent for much of the story, appear for a grand time in the country, with friends old and new. An extensive author’s note details the massive scale of the substance use and addiction crisis in the United States, where one child in eight under the age of eighteen lives with at least one parent dealing with a drug or alcohol problem.

From the ">September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.