Shifty by Lynn E. Hazen (Tricycle, $15.99, 9781582462578/1582462577, 192 pp., ages 12-up, September)
Soli, aka "Shifty," survives by his wits. His 15-year-old narrator's voice will carry readers through this chronicle of four days in the lives of his San Francisco foster family members: seven-year-old Sissy; a crack baby named Thaddeus, whom they call "Chance"; and Martha, their widowed foster mother, who has a prosthetic left leg from the knee down. Martha does not have much, but what she does have she shares, including her love and trust. Hazen (Mermaid Mary Margaret) creates fully formed characters here, and through Soli's narration, the audience witnesses firsthand his resourcefulness and rationalizations. So it makes perfect sense to Soli, for instance, when he's feeling pressed for time, to sneak the keys to Martha's minivan so he can drive Sissy to the Toy Mart to purchase a gift for her friend Darlene's birthday party. Finding no parking spot, he takes a handicapped space (Martha even has a handicapped tag, but he forgets to put that on the windshield), and when a cop starts to issue a ticket, he conveniently finds an elderly lady in the shop whom he calls "Mama" and who happily accepts a lift. Soli is out of a jam. Or is he? Hazen has a gift for turning humor into poignant situations devoid of sentiment. Later, Soli and Sissy meet up with the same cop again, and discover that the elderly woman's name is Annie Simmons and she is in the hospital; the two children find themselves labeled "next of kin" and get pulled into Annie's rather complicated life. The plotting becomes at times too dense (e.g., at the doctor's office when a shady character tries to get Sissy to give a sample for the woman's urine test), and some readers may think Soli has one too many close calls from which he escapes. But the realistic relationships between the four foster family members, their ability to believe in each other in a world where each of them has already had more than their share of bad breaks and Soli's survivor-humor make these characters memorable.--Jennifer M. Brown
