Merci Suárez Changes Gears

Merci Suárez is a scholarship student at Seaward Pines Academy, a private school where she and her older brother Roli stand out among wealthier classmates, and the book follows her through a sixth grade year crowded with small social pressures, an assigned Sunshine Buddy named Michael Clark she has to shepherd around campus, and a classmate, Edna Santos, whose friendship keeps curdling into rivalry and occasional cruelty. At home Merci's family occupies three houses clustered together on the same Florida street, an arrangement close enough that everyone is always in everyone else's business, and Merci spends her free hours babysitting her twin younger cousins and riding bikes with her grandfather Lolo, the family member she is closest to. Partway through the year Lolo begins acting strangely, losing his place mid sentence, wandering off during a family outing, snapping at people he loves without explanation, and Merci watches the adults around her dance around a diagnosis they will not name to her directly even as it reshapes the whole household. Medina keeps the story's momentum on the ordinary business of being eleven, wanting a new bicycle, navigating a mean message sent behind her back, arguing with Roli, even as Lolo's condition becomes harder for the family to manage quietly, until the adults finally name it to her: Lolo has Alzheimer's disease, and it will not get better. Merci is left working out how much of her grandfather's changing behavior she has to grieve and how much she still gets to simply love, and the book follows that tension through the end of the school year without letting either the family's private strain or Merci's own social world resolve too neatly.

Medina writes in Merci's frank, sometimes prickly first person voice, and the book moves briskly between school drama and home life without ever treating either as less serious than the other. It suits readers who like a full, lived in extended family and a narrator who does not always behave well, and its handling of a beloved grandfather's decline lands with real weight precisely because the book refuses to slow down and treat it as the only thing happening in Merci's life that year.