ALA Booklist (Tue Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2016)

When 11-year-old Thyme's brother, Val, is accepted into a cancer treatment trial in New York, their family is uprooted from California with the hope of a cure. Thyme trusts the move will be temporary, but as Val's treatments show improvement, her parents keep secrets, and her sister gets involved in school, Thyme begins to wonder if New York might be a more permanent arrangement. Thyme wants to be there for her brother, so she can't help but feel guilty about wishing she could go back home. When things begin to get complicated at school with new friends and a first crush, Thyme feels torn between two places r family and making her own way. Debut author Conklin writes with a pitch-perfect middle-grade voice, capturing Thyme's confusion and emotional struggle. The family dynamics are well developed and capture the dissonance that can happen during a family crisis. A nice choice for middle-grade readers who enjoy heartfelt and emotional novels.

Horn Book

Thyme's little brother, Val, is accepted into a drug trial designed to cure his rare form of cancer. But the trial is in New York and eleven-year-old Thyme's whole life--including best friend Shani and beloved Grandma Kay--is in San Diego. Growing pains, a family in crisis, and one child's immense fear of loss are compassionately and honestly depicted in Conklin's debut novel.

School Library Journal (Mon Feb 01 00:00:00 CST 2016)

Gr 4-7 When her five-year-old brother Val begins a clinical trial for cancer treatment at New York's Sloane Kettering Hospital, 11-year-old Thyme and her family leave their beloved San Diego home to move to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Thyme embraces her role as the helpful middle sister, secretly saving slips of "time"good behavior chitsso she can go home, all the while trying to avoid adjusting to New York or letting anyone at school know about Val's illness. With just the right pace of character development and a believable voice for the shy, awkward Thyme, Conklin takes her protagonist through a journey of connecting to others and learning to articulate her own needs. A constant but quiet tension runs throughout, both concerning Val's health and Thyme's emotional growth; readers continuously watch Thyme's reactions as other charactersincluding a cute boy who seems to understand about secretsreach out to her. Sadness and hope are well balanced, and the family characters and interactions are tense but full of love. Most experienced readers will recognize several overused plot points (e.g., young girl befriends lonely, grumpy, elderly neighbor; immigrant housekeeper lends strength through her cooking) and wonder at this upper middle class white girl's lack of awareness or curiosity about her cultural and socioeconomic place in her new home. VERDICT A slow and sweet book that will strum the heartstrings of readers in much the same ways as Jo Knowles's See You at Harry's (Candlewick, 2012), Wendy Mass's A Mango-Shaped Space (Little, Brown, 2003), or Katherine Hannigan's Ida B: And Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World (Scholastic, 2004). Rhona Campbell, Georgetown Day School, Washington, DC