Newbery Award-winning author Rebecca Stead (When You Reach Me) has a gift for inhabiting the minds and hearts of young readers. In her Indie Next List title The List of Things that Will Not Change, she explores the messy feelings that come with divorce from the perspective of Bea, a girl who bubbles over with love, rage, anxiety, shame and hopeful anticipation.
Stead understands that the kinds of things a child worries about can be unexpectedly different from what an older person might fear. Bea's narrative is, in Stead's hands, droll, poignant and always realistic, whether she's angst-ridden about the fifth-grade colonial breakfast project or trying not to scratch her eczema. Stead masterfully explores the internal life of a girl going through both extraordinary and run-of-the-mill trials in a way that tells readers they are not alone in their complicated, contradictory feelings about the world. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor