WHERE I LIVE

First-person free-verse poems describe the emotional journey made by one little girl when her family is forced to move. Diana is perfectly happy where she lives: Her house is yellow with white shutters, has a maple tree she planted in the front yard and a midnight-blue bedroom painted by Diana and her best friend Rose. But when her father loses his job, the family must move across the state to Grandpa Joe’s, leaving behind Rose, the maple tree and the poetry workshop she’d competed for a spot in. Spinelli employs the shortest of lines in her brief poems, Diana’s voice ingenuously describing the simple, perfect life of a middle-grader interested in astronomy and poetry, and whose family and friends provide all she needs. So well does she execute her exposition, however, that Diana’s eventual adjustment to her new home, aided by her poetry and her new friend Sam, makes for a somewhat abrupt, if satisfying resolution. Phelan’s winning spot illustrations match the poems in brevity and sensitivity, ably complementing the text. All in all, a pleasing portrait of the healing that can follow an all-too-common childhood trauma. (Fiction/poetry. 7-11)