This book received the Newbery Honor award back in 2009, but somehow I missed it until just this year. Benjamin suggested it might be a good read aloud, so we read it a chapter a night as a family. It was a great chapter a night book, because the chapters are quite short, and we are pretty busy people. In this version of reality, there is a family in which each person has a special Savvy. One of the family can cause electrical activity, while another can capture radio waves in jars. The people of the family "get" their Savvy on their thirteenth birthday, and the main character of the story, Mibs, is excited as her birthday approaches, and wonders what her savvy will be. Then, just two days before her birthday, her father is in a terrible car accident and is in a coma. Mibs and her siblings are left in the care of a neighbor who doesn't know about their special gifts. When Mib's birthday comes, she believes that her gift will help her father, so she stows away on a bible delivery bus to try to get to the city where he is. Most of the book consists of the crazy bus trip with Mibs, her older brother, her younger brother, and two neighbor kids. The bus takes some unexpected detours, the kids meet some interesting people, and learn more about each other and themselves. I can see why this was a Newbery contender. The story is fast and funny, the characterizations are rich and fully developed, and the story contains some thought provoking philosophical questions . (342 p.)
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