DELIVER US FROM NORMAL

Klise, better known for oddball mysteries, goes here for a more character-driven family story, narrated by an 11-year-old middle child edging toward serious depression. Compiling lists like “The Most Embarrassing Things in My Life,” Charles Harrisong glumly records efforts of his hardworking parents to make ends meet, the tumultuous teasing and tears at home among his four siblings and his own unsuccessful efforts to escape the jeering notice of his middle school’s in-crowd. Just beneath these seemingly routine trappings, however, lurks a far more rewarding tale, for the Harrisongs are one of those uncommon (at least, in literature) species, a cohesive nuclear family whose members, for all their occasional fallings-out, love and respect each other to pieces. Better yet, Klise doesn’t tell, she shows, leading readers gradually into the hearts and spirits of her characters—while taking those characters on a seriocomic odyssey of their own, as they impetuously leave their rented Illinois home for a leaky houseboat off the Alabama coast, and a well-earned fresh start. Nothing “normal” here. (Fiction. 11-13)