But it also means the Owens family has to move to New York, thousands of miles away from Thyme’s best friend and everything she knows and loves. The moving takeaway is that families need to pull together to help their most vulnerable members.Summary: When eleven-year-old Thyme Owens’ little brother, Val, is accepted into a new cancer drug trial, it’s just the second chance that he needs.

The portraits of this girl, her family, and New York City, are very real, and the tone is hopeful.

Thyme has to adjust to her new public middle school, where she encounters mild bullying, cliques, a Queen Bee and the girls who buzz around her, and also experiences her first crush and the seeds of new friendships we know will blossom. The family story's braided with chapters that will resonate more broadly with readers and their everyday experiences. The stresses on the family are credibly written - the parents, though loving, are consumed with the boy's care, so Thyme and her teen sister, Cori, get short shrift. There's some technical medical information, skillfully explained, about the boy's cancer and his treatments. Show moreĪ girl deals with her brother's serious illness in this sensitively written, fully fleshed out middle-grade novel that's both a portrait of a family under stress and an engaging coming-of-age story. As Thyme adjusts, she manages to keep an old friend in California while making new friends and forging a new life in New York. It weaves medical information about the disease into the story, with family scenes at home and chapters set in school in which Thyme deals with typical middle school concerns such as friendships, cliques, crushes, and involvement in a school play. The story follows her arrival at a public middle school just after Thanksgiving through her grwoing acceptance of her new home as the second semester unfolds. Val's physically vulnerable, and the parents, while loving, are understandably consumed with his care, leaving Thyme to adjust to a new school and to the big city, where people live in housing that's more compact than she's used to, and travel by subway, which feels overwhelming.

In COUNTING THYME, 11-year-old Thyme and her family move from San Diego to New York City so her little brother Val who has neuroblastoma, a form of cancer, can be in a clinical trial for treatment.

Counting thyme by melanie conklin