It doesn't take long for Genie to see how different "the little house all alone on the top of a hill" is from Brooklyn: "No brownstones with the cement stoops where you could watch the buses, ice cream trucks, and taxis ride by. Nope. North Hill, Virginia, was country. Like country country." New revelations abound: when Genie tells Grandpop that wearing sunglasses inside "makes you look crazy," he learns that his grandfather is blind. (This worries him, too.) Genie also ponders their uncle's death in Desert Storm, masked fears, pea-picking, loud thunder, people who eat squirrels, the ins and outs of Grandpop's mysterious six-shooter, sweet tea and more.
Unfolding family secrets and upsetting mishaps, major and minor, keep the pages flying, and how obsessive Genie and his "cool, confident" older brother, Ernie, settle in with their grandparents makes for a poignant, profound, often very funny story, told in an easy style as smooth as Grandma's banana pudding. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness