Katherine Hannigan.  Ida B . . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World.  Greenwillow Books, 2004.  246 pages.  Age 9 to 12.

Ida B likes to make plans—big plans—and she doesn’t want to spend a minute doing anything mundane.  She measures annoyances in minutes and miles (such as when she interprets a comment of her father’s as “about two miles beyond wrong”).  She has a rich social life with the trees in her family’s apple orchard, each with its own name and personality, and her life is one of love and happiness.  But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, her plans come to require constant revision.

Her mother’s illness and fatigue are a catalyst for new problems.  Hospital bills cause her father to sell a portion of their land (which, in turn, causes of some of her tree friends to be razed), and Ida B is forced to return to public school after years of home learning.  An epic battle between her thoughts and feelings ensues.  To quell her pain and sadness, her heart shrivels into something black, “so hard nobody could break it and so sharp it would hurt anybody who touched it.”  Her parents, teacher, classmates, and new neighbors all become her sworn enemies.  She keeps them at a distance using tactical avoidance and “masterpieces of terror”—signs declaring dangers, such as plagues of locusts, accompanied by graphic imagery and “signed” by the police chief.

Ida B, who is neither cold nor uncaring by nature, works hard to maintain her new so-called heart, especially when, against her will, part of her starts to care about the people she’s made into enemies.  She reacts by banishing the part of her that cares to behind her left knee, but it demands to be heard, manifest through physical pain.  Eventually she begins to warm to her new circumstances at school and adjust to the changes at home.  There aren’t any magical fixes at the end (she and the girl she sparred with don’t suddenly become best friends) but you leave with the feeling that Ida B is now wiser, more likely to be flexible, and ready to face her future.

Quotable:

I like when an analogy is rooted in context, and not just clever:

“That cancer was like bugs in a tree:  one day you don’t see them at all and the next it seems like they’re everywhere, eating the leaves and the fruit.  And it won’t work to find them and squish them one by one.  You have to do something drastic.” (p.66)

Sometimes it’s the only way:

“But as I cried, my heart was being transformed. It was getting smaller and smaller in my chest and hardening up like a rock. The smaller and harder my heart got, the less I cried, until finally I stopped completely.” (p. 71)

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