Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

I might have a new author to add to my favorite lists.

Somehow when I finished The Running Dream last year, I never got around to reviewing it which is a shame because it is an excellent YA novel about a high school track star who loses her leg in a bus accident coming back from a Meet.  I'm not going to review it here past saying that I would recommend it to any of my athlete girls and most of the boys too. It's that good.

I kind of forgot about Van Draanen after that. It was a busy year and a cursory look at her bibliography led me to believe that The Running Dream was an outlier. She seems to mostly write for an elementary school audience. I mainly stick to YA, teen and Middle Readers. So, when I was doing my recent book buys I kept tripping across Flipped and couldn't figure out why the author name looked so familiar until I found a copy of it shelved next to The Running Dream. Then it clicked.

I read it over a single morning. What really pulled me in was the structure. Flipped is told from two points of view: a somewhat quirky girl named Juli and Bryce whose family is all about appearance. The chapters alternate narrators, but where as most novels with multiple narrators tend to use the shift in POV to advance the sequence of events, in Flipped the two narrators are telling the reader about the same events but from their very different perspectives. As a result, the story has a little bit of a Rashomon feel to it. It's an excellent demonstration of the use of point of view.

The story, on its surface, is a pretty standard teen romance. Juli, at the tender age of seven, is smitten at first sight with Bryce when he moves in across the street. The crush continues through middle school until she finally realizes that she doesn't really even know the object of her affections. Bryce on the other hand is completely conflict avoidant and this somewhat intense girl makes him want to run for the hills until one day he sees her in a different light and then he can't stop looking at her.

Like I said, pretty standard. What makes it worth reading is the conflict between the two interpretations of events. Both narrators end up sympathetic and the families around the two characters are full of interesting characters.

I would recommend this to both male and female teens and middle schoolers.