In her first novel, Urban captures the essence of the sixth-grade experience with humor and insight. Narrator Zoe Elias dreams of playing Carnegie Hall like her hero, Vladimir Horowitz. Zoe's mother is controller for the state of Michigan and "knows how every dime is spent." Her father has 26 framed diplomas from Living Room University and is afraid to leave the house; his best friend is the UPS man. Zoe's household sets the scene for a heroine who is both intelligent and slightly out of touch. Zoe is smart enough to know that, even as her mother impresses her classroom on Career Day by remembering every student's name and the coin she gave to each, her peers will hate her when her mother asks them to pass the coins back at the end of her presentation--especially scary Wheeler Diggs. Yet Zoe naïvely brings toe socks as a birthday gift when bare feet and "Brat" brand clogs are all the rage.Urban's keen sense of pacing allows readers to be swept up by the humor and taken by surprise in moments of poignancy. After repeatedly requesting a piano, Zoe finds herself with a Perfectone D-60 ("A wood-grained, vinyl-seated, wheeze-bag organ") and six months of free lessons from Mabelline Person, who demands Vernors in a glass with ice. Most of the time, Zoe is an A+ lemonade-maker whose perseverance winds up inspiring everyone around her. Zoe's teacher even recommends that she compete in the Perfectone Perform-O-Rama. On her 11th birthday, however, when her mother misses her celebration due to a "ledger emergency," Zoe breaks down like an organ unplugged during a sustained chord. But that makes her human. After all, as Zoe points out, it was Horowitz who said, "Perfection itself is imperfection." Zoe's father, Wheeler Diggs and even Hugh the UPS man make surprising contributions as these winning characters--Zoe chief among them--travel along the road to a crooked kind of perfect.--Jennifer M. Brown