Different Kinds of Fruit

Gr 5 Up–Newbery Honor–winning author Lukoff brings a middle grade novel to warm the hearts of every rainbow family and ally. Annabelle enters sixth grade ready to make her final year at her small private school a great one—and the year starts auspiciously with a young teacher and a new friend, Bailey, who is nonbinary. All this good feeling begins to dwindle when Annabelle’s father is inexplicably rude to Bailey, and the school principal allows an entitled mom to disrupt the class’ plans to learn social studies by doing self-directed projects. Lukoff masterfully portrays the personalities, both child and adult, that Annabelle comes to know, believes she knows, and those whom Annabelle questions can ever know her. When she must handle the revelation that her own parents are queer and her transgender father gave birth to her, events could have become too big for the story. Yet Lukoff keeps them emotionally and narratively real, inviting empathy.