At age nine, Josh Sundquist was diagnosed with cancer and had his left leg amputated at the hip. This memoir leads readers through a charmingly honest catalogue of his past almost-girlfriends.
Josh opens in eighth grade with a wicked crush on Sarah Stevens. He describes the universal pains of middle-school crushes--putting your BFF up to finding out if your crush is mutual and your crush's BFF serving as messenger back, and requited crushes that fizzle out before they even begin. Sundquist uses charts, graphs, footnotes and Venn diagrams to ramp up the deadpan humor. His prologue sets the tone: "When I was twenty-five years old, it came to my attention that I had never had a girlfriend." His clear-eyed observations about his family and the young women to whom he's attracted will entertain and pierce readers, in equal measure. On his first day of public school in ninth grade, an upper-classman trips Josh, and he describes his step-by-step process of righting himself with his prosthesis. We see how he goes to great lengths to abide by his two rules: 1. Never be a burden. 2. Never be different.
After Josh's description of each would-be girlfriend encounter, he hypothesizes about why things didn't work out, then launches an investigation (he tracks down the almost-girlfriend to test each hypothesis). Some investigations are inconclusive, others non-events; with still others, such as prom date Evelyn, Josh learns that things might have worked out if he'd read the signals properly. Best of all, his story has a happy ending. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness