Savvy, by Ingrid Law

From the jacket: Mibs Beaumont is about to become a teenager. As if that prospect weren’t scary enough, thirteen is when a Beaumont’s savvy strikes — and with one brother who causes hurricanes and another who creates electricity, it promises to be outrageous … and positively thrilling. But just before her big day, Poppa is in a terrible accident. Suddenly, Mibs’s dreams of X-ray vision disappear like a flash of her brother’s lightning: All she wants now is a savvy that will save Poppa.”

My take: The Beaumonts are a perfectly ordinary family, just like other people. “We get born, and sometime later we die. And in between, we’re happy and sad, we feel love and we feel fear, we eat and we sleep and we hurt like everyone else.” That’s what they tell people, anyway. But when they turn 13, their power appears. Mibs’ older brothers have the ability to direct wind, rain, and electricity. Her grandfather moves land. Her mom is not, as Mibs believes, perfect, but has a knack for getting things right — even when it turns out she is exactly right at getting things wrong. A great-aunt can open locks, but uses her savvy to help herself to others’ belongings. And her late grandmother could pluck music and voices right off the radio and bottle them up for repeated listenings.

So it’s understandable that Mibs and her whole family are excited — and a little nervous — about her impending birthday. When one brother’s savvy caused a hurricane on his 13th birthday a few years earlier, they’d had to move far away from their beloved home on the shore and move to the middle of the country, far away from any body of water where he could cause disasters. What would Mibs’ gift be? Would it, too, cause problems?

But, then, a phone call brings her whole world falling in around her.

Her father has been in a life-threatening accident and her mother and eldest brother must go to Salina to the hospital, leaving the four younger kids in the care of their elderly grandfather. Mibs returns from her final day of public school (you can’t be expected to sit in a classroom when you might, at any moment, cause a storm to rip the roof off if someone upsets you, after all), to find their preacher’s wife setting up shop in their kitchen, intent on taking care of their own in a time of crisis. She even goes so far as to insist on inviting the Kansaska-Nebransas community to a birthday party for Mibs.

But when Mibs gets up on her birthday, she realizes that her savvy has already arrived. She has, she believes, the ability to awaken those who are sleeping, or who seem to be sleeping. And this savvy has appeared just at the right time for her to get to the Salina hospital where her father lies unconscious.

But how to get there with no adult in whom to confide her newly awakened gift?

As luck would have it, her birthday party overlaps with the delivery of some hot pink bibles to the church and the deliveryman’s bus suggests he’ll be heading back to his Salina headquarters soon. So, Mibs, followed by the preacher’s kids (Bobbie and Will, Jr.), and her two brothers, Fish and Samson, stow away in the back of the bus, hoping to hitch a lift to heal her father.

But what Mibs hasn’t yet shared with anyone is that the stress of her father’s accident has left her hearing voices in her head. And they seem to be coming from the oddest places…

Will her new friends and her brothers think she’s crazy? Can the Beaumonts keep their family’s secret from Bobbie and Will, who, it turns out, may just have a few secrets of their own. What happens when the driver of the hot pink bus finds them hidden amidst his wares? And will they make it to Salina in time?

I loved this book. Mibs’ voice is so real (as are the voices of those around her), and her desire to be useful and to get to her father are palpable and urgent. Law has done a good job of creating an ordinary girl from an extraordinary family and allowing her to grow up on the page before our eyes. I’d recommend it to any reader without hesitation.

Favorite passage: Momma is talking to Fish and Rocket about how to find their personal balances, using painting as a metaphor: “‘If you don’t use enough paint,’ Momma continued, ‘Your savvy will come through too strong, causing some pretty big problems for both you and the rest of the world…. If you use too much paint, you’ll not only obscure your savvy completely, but most everything else in life will become dull and uninteresting for you too. You can’t get rid of part of what makes you you and be happy.'” (page 185)

Pages: 342