"My Jasper June" by Laurel Snyder

Most of this book was good, except for one part in the middle where it was like the author forgot that she wasn't writing YA instead of middle-grade fiction. Aside from that, the book was like an odd mix of Alone, Hazard, and The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly. 

 

It had Alone's relatively self-sufficient early teen girl protagonist (and deuteragonist, here; Alone doesn't have that). It had Hazard's serious take on mental health issues and its initially-mysterious past tragedies. And it had The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly's parental sanity problems and disappointing content level spike. (Don't get me wrong, this book doesn't have the same spike content type as TMPoCO'R, so that's good, at least.)

The book is about a thirteen-year-old girl named Leah, whose entire family is depressed now because of something that happened about a year ago. It's also about a slightly older girl named Jasper (title character!), whose home situation is mysterious but obviously terrible. (Well, actually, |her home situation is nonexistent, as Leah learns about a third of the way through the book. Jasper doesn't have one|.)

So, yes, it's a rather serious book. It all ends well, though.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for discussion of domestic abuse... except for pages 180 through 183. As I said above, it's like the author forgot she was writing middle-grade fiction for a moment. Those pages are T15+ for |sexual and drug references; it's when Leah's mom automatically jumps to assuming the worst about what Jasper and Leah get up to|. Which drags the book as a whole up to T15+.

Because of that, I'm giving My Jasper June 3 stars. Had it been intended as a YA book and placed in the YA section in the library, I would have just accepted pages 180-183 as part of normal YA content and moved on, and given the book 4 stars instead. But since it showed up in something in the normal-fiction-for-kids section... nope. (At least it had enough inherent quality that it didn't go the way of that one.)

(Endnote: About halfway through the book, I could just hear the footsteps of doom arriving. I'm not sure whether this was due to the author subtly foreshadowing or to me metagaming based on how these sorts of books usually go.)