The Summer I Saved the World... in 65 Days
The Summer I Saved the World... in 65 Days
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Random House
Annotation: Inspired by her late grandmother, thirteen-year-old Nina spends a summer secretly doing good deeds for her neighbors and enjoying the changes she brings about, even as she is dealing with changing friendships and family issues.
Genre: [Love stories]
 
Reviews: 8
Catalog Number: #5670696
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House
Copyright Date: 2015
Edition Date: 2015 Release Date: 04/14/15
Pages: 264 pages
ISBN: 0-385-37109-8
ISBN 13: 978-0-385-37109-4
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2013016843
Dimensions: 21 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
ALA Booklist (Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2014)

It begins with Mrs. Chung's marigolds. Mourning the loss of her beloved grandmother and grappling with the changes her family has undergone in the last year, 13-year-old Nina Ross is feeling adrift. Her attorney parents are largely absent, her older brother is leaving for college, and her best friend has gone boy crazy. After Nina impulsively plants the marigolds her neighbor, who has a broken leg, can't manage, Nina decides to find out if committing small, anonymous acts of kindness will make a difference in the lives of the people around her, setting off on a crusade to do one good thing for each of the 65 days of summer between eighth grade and the beginning of high school. Hurwitz (Calli Be Gold, 2011) has given readers a sensitive narrator struggling with real, if not terribly dramatic, issues. Insightful writing, realistic dialogue infused with humor, and a sweet romantic element add depth to the story. Tween readers will identify with Nina and may be inspired to emulate her list of good things with their own.

Horn Book

The summer before ninth grade, Nina is adrift: she's growing apart from her best friend, and her family hardly speaks to one another. Then she decides to do one small, anonymous kind act each day, hoping to bring some good to her neighborhood. Nina is a thoughtful, inspiring hero who proves that one person really can make a difference.

Kirkus Reviews

What happens when a teenage girl tries to change the world in 65 tiny ways? It is the beginning of summer, and 13-year-old Nina is lonely and rudderless; she is still mourning the loss of her beloved grandmother, her type-A lawyer parents are AWOL, and her older brother is occupied by his job. To make matters worse, she is growing apart from her best friend, Jorie, who is increasingly interested in nail polish and skimpy clothes—and in Eli, the neighbor boy they've grown up with and whom Nina herself is falling for. But it is the parting words of her eighth-grade history teacher that give purpose to her summer: "It is very often the ordinary things that go unnoticed that end up making a difference." Inspired, Nina plans to perform 65 small, anonymous acts of kindness for her family and neighbors—one for each day of her summer. She leaves brownies on a doorstep, plants a garden in the dead of night and secretly cleans up a neighbor's yard. Through her friendship with Thomas, Eli's irresistible toy-sword–wielding little brother, she discovers Eli has family troubles of his own. Teens will easily ally with the kindhearted, insecure Nina and be charmed by the humor and beautifully defined characters. The unpredictable domino effect of Nina's good deeds is a joy to behold. Joyful dividends are reaped from a teenager's secret acts of kindness in this appealingly, unabashedly feel-good story. (Fiction. 10-14)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Written in the spirit of Paul Fleisch-man-s Seedfolks and Catherine Ryan Hyde-s Pay It Forward, Hurwitz-s (Calli Be Gold) novel celebrates the surprising effects of small acts of kindness in one neighborhood. It all begins when 13-year-old Nina Ross decides to take a risk the summer before high school. Although she-s not usually -the kind of person who goes out of her way to help people,- she secretly plants a marigold bed for an injured neighbor who can-t do the gardening herself. The happy response from ailing Mrs. Chung inspires Nina to perform 64 more good deeds, one for each day of the summer. As Nina finds ways to help others, not everyone recognizes or appreciates her efforts. Nonetheless, she gains insight into the complicated lives and emotions of her neighbors, family members, and friends. Touching on universal feelings of loss, jealousy, love, and the gratification that comes from doing the right thing, the story should strike familiar chords with suburbanites and give hope to those who think one person can-t possibly make a difference. Ages 10-up. Agent: Alyssa Eisner Henkin, Trident Media Group. (Apr.)

Voice of Youth Advocates

As summer vacation starts, thirteen-year-old Nina reflects on how her life has changed. Her beloved grandmother and soul mate has passed away; her brother and parents (law firm partners) are always busy; and best friend Jorie is consumed with getting Eli to take her to Homecoming. Nina feels different about "buddy" Eli also. Shaking off her lethargy, she decides to perform a secret good deed each day. First, she plants Mrs. Chung's marigolds and then leaves a rose for Mr. Dembrowski. But some of the neighbors become suspicious and Mrs. Millman insists that ghosts are occupying the vacant house. Worse yet, Jorie and Eli appear to be a couple and Nina's brother seems headed for trouble. The night that "ghost busters" arrive to treat the spooky house, the Cantaloni's new baby decides to enter the world. Everyone unites to help them and Nina realizes that her ordinary deeds have made a remarkable difference.Likable and refreshing, Nina has a practical "old soul" persona. She sews, bakes, and does not flip out over a malfunctioning cell phone. Intuitive about herself and others, she seizes the opportunity of a kiss with Eli and later figures out how to maintain her friendship with Jorie. Plenty of breezy dialogue helps move the plot while some slapstick humorthe ghost busters cause a black-outand a touch of mystery (is the vacant house haunted?) maintain interest. With its high school interactions and happy ending, tween girls will enjoy this novel.Barbara Johnston.

Reviewing Agencies: - Find Other Reviewed Titles
ALA Booklist (Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2014)
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
Horn Book
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
Voice of Youth Advocates
Wilson's Children's Catalog
Wilson's Junior High Catalog
Word Count: 42,259
Reading Level: 3.5
Interest Level: 5-9
Accelerated Reader: reading level: 3.5 / points: 6.0 / quiz: 170146 / grade: Middle Grades
Reading Counts!: reading level:4.1 / points:12.0 / quiz:Q68862
Guided Reading Level: X
Fountas & Pinnell: X
1
It starts with Mrs. Chung.
And flowers.
Marigolds.
My grandmother believed in what she called STs--Simple Truths. This was one of her favorites: Things happen when they're meant to happen, and the sooner people realize that, the more content they'll be. Most people, she said, don't understand, even when those things are right in front of them.
Today, the first day of summer vacation, while I'm on the hammock in my side yard, listening to music and trying to figure out why my phone is being weird, and tanning, and letting my freshly painted toenails dry, am I meant to see Mrs. Chung hobbling around on her crutches? Is this one of those things that is meant to happen?
Mrs. Chung has lived next door to us for as long as my family has been here--nine years--and way before that. There was a Mr. Chung, and two kids, but he died and the kids grew up and moved away. So Mrs. Chung lives by herself in that big house. With Christmas lights strung across her trees all year round. Never on, not even in December. Kind of sad, the wires just hanging off those trees, like there's no one to light them for anymore.
She's leaning on her crutches, looking at two plastic trays of flowers in her front yard. Her wrinkled face is like a drawing on a paper fan, folded in disappointment. She's mumbling to herself and shaking her head and pointing with one crutch to where she always plants her flowers in the spring, around the neatly trimmed evergreen bushes.
Two things I am not: a genius, and the kind of person who goes out of her way to help people. The first one, I can wish for, but it simply isn't going to happen, and the second one, well, I really admire those types. It's just that I don't usually step up. I think a lot of people are like that. They let someone else take care of things.
I don't have to be a genius to figure out that Mrs. Chung can't plant the flowers with her leg in a cast. I'm watching her, the hammock rocking slowly in the breeze, when I remember how Mr. Chung used to shovel the sidewalk when we had big snows, and how he went all the way from his driveway to ours, even though we should have shoveled our part. But somehow we never got around to it. Dad was working late, my brother was lazy, and Mom couldn't stand the cold. Me? I guess I kept thinking one of them would do it eventually; plus I had tons of homework. Or another excuse that seemed important at the time.
Mrs. Chung goes into her garage and half pushes, half drags a chair over to the flower trays. She sits, pats her forehead with a tissue, and then leans down and takes out one marigold. She holds it for a few minutes, cradled in her hands. Then she pulls herself up with the crutches, places the flower gently on the chair, and goes inside.
For some reason, I start thinking about what Mr. Pontello told us on our last day of eighth-grade US history, everyone sweaty and hyper and impatient, aching to peel their legs from their seats and leave that classroom forever.
He said, "It is very often the ordinary things that go unnoticed that end up making a difference. As you embark upon your high school careers, be unnoticed, but be remarkable."
I think I was the only one listening.
The little boy from next door, Thomas, runs out of his open garage and starts hopping. From his grass to mine, and then all the way to Mrs. Chung's driveway.
He turns toward me and shouts, "Nina! I learned how to hop!"
"Great!"
"You have to switch feet," he says, out of breath but smiling big. "So one foot doesn't get too tired."
I touch the edge of a toenail to see if it's dry as Thomas hops over to Mrs. Chung's flower trays. He stops, then looks over at me. "Why are the flowers in here?"
I shrug.
He stares at them. "But how will they grow if they're not in the ground?" He hops over to the chair and picks up the wilting marigold. "Poor flower."
Thomas puts the flower down and hops all the way back to his house. Pretty good for a five-year-old.
Two birds are on the love seat at the edge of my patio. I watch their jerky head movements, like they're talking to each other in their secret bird language. Go ahead, I think. No one else sits on the love seat anymore.
All-weather wicker with dark green cushions that Mom ordered from a catalog a few summers ago. She kept saying, "It's all-weather; it won't fade or tear or stain. It will last forever. Forever." She copied the layout exactly as it had been on the page in the catalog, right down to the vase of huge droopy white flowers on the all-weather wicker-and-glass table.
The day the furniture was delivered, Mom made a pitcher of lemonade, because that was in the catalog picture too, and we sat on the patio together, Mom and Dad and me and Matt. Mom poured the lemonade into fancy glasses and put strawberries on the rims. Dad made a joking toast to the new furniture. Matt and I clinked our glasses and took big swallows. But the lemonade was so sour that we both started coughing. Matt went inside, got the box of sugar, and started pouring it into the pitcher, mixing it with a long wooden spoon. Dad said, "Take it easy, Matthew" just as the box fell into the pitcher and the whole thing tipped over. Matt and I stared at Mom. What was she going to do? Would she get mad? He'd ruined the catalog picture. But Dad started laughing and said, "Who'd like some sugar-ade?" and Matt drank a whole glass after I dared him.
The love seat has become almost creepy now, part of the garden, with a long strand of ivy wrapped around one of the armrests and a huge spiderweb underneath. A dry leaf twirls from a tree and lands next to the birds, and they fly off. Empty cushions. How sad--a love seat that needs love.
The last time I sat on it was with Grandma. Just her and me, in the quiet of our yard, holding hands. Hers were white and frail, bumpy with blue veins, and I tried to memorize the way they looked. She'd been sick for a while. Her heart was failing, and I knew she didn't have much longer.
It has been almost a year since she died. I get hit with these moments, when I miss her so terribly--and can't even think about what has happened with my family--that I don't know what to do, how to make it not hurt so much. I've tried running around the block and turning my music up really loud, but that helps for only a short time.
Sometimes it feels like the dull ache in my chest is going to spill all over, seep into my cracks and corners, and stay forever.
The warm breeze lifts my hair, skims the back of my neck, moves across the grass like an electric current.
And there it all is, right in front of me. My prompt, I guess you could say. Grandma's Simple Truth and the empty love seat and Mrs. Chung's empty garden. Thomas's question. Mr. Pontello's advice. Even Mr. Chung doing our shoveling all those winters.
Get up. Do something. Now.
I walk to Mrs. Chung's and peek through her window. She's stretched out on the sofa, exhausted, that big, thick white cast covering her leg. How'd she break it? I don't even know.
I find a little digging tool in our garage, then drag the first tray of flowers to Mrs. Chung's evergreen bushes. Every spring, she arranges her marigolds in curving waves of color--deep reds on the outside, a middle wave of oranges, to golden, then the lightest yellow. Like a sunset.
As I dig the first hole, I feel a little panicky that she'll come out and be mad or something. You know how adults can jump to the conclusion that teenagers must be doing something wrong.
I don't know what I'll say if she does come out, so I take the flower from the chair and just focus on patting it into the dirt. Then another, and another. And suddenly I have a row.
I get up and look in the window again. Mrs. Chung has fallen asleep, so I keep going.
No one is around. Mom and Dad--at work. Matt--BMIA. Brother Missing in Action. Friends--complicated.
It's just me and the flowers.
One hour later, I have strips of black dirt under my fingernails and crisscross impressions of grass on my knees, and my back and neck are really stiff. But when I soak the flowers with water from our hose, there is Mrs. Chung's sparkling, dripping marigold sunset, just the way it's supposed to be.
For the first time in my life, I didn't wait for someone else to step up.
And that is the beginning of everything.

2
I can't tell Jorie. She won't get it.
We both know we became friends because we're neighbors. She lives on the other side of Mrs. Chung. But when you look at us--her with the newest, smartest phone in one back pocket of her skintight jeans and a lip gloss and mascara in the other, and me in need of some reworking--I wonder how it has lasted this long. In first grade, when Jorie moved into the cul-de-sac, we had playdates and did the things first-grade girls do. That was enough back then.
But now? Jorie and I are in between two places. Like an intermission between the first and second acts of a play. I'm not sure how things are going to end up.
It's Saturday afternoon and I'm in her room. As usual, she's doing twenty things at the same time: zooming back and forth between five open windows on her laptop, dissecting the advice in three beauty magazines, tapping on her phone, finding some music, talking nonstop. I'll say this: she's always been fun to watch.
I'm on her bed, trying to find the right-size mushy pillow to mold under my sore neck. There are about a dozen neon-colored ones to choose from.
Jorie pops her gum and blows a bubble, turns a magazine page. "Hey, did you see Mrs. Chung this morning?"
I sit up. "No. What about her?"
"She was walking around the sidewalk on her crutches, like, crying and all upset. Freaked out, talking to herself." Jorie looks at me. "Wait. I never remember, is she Chinese or Korean?"
"Korean."
"Oh, yeah. Anyway, so my dad went over to talk to her, and get this. Someone sneaked into her yard and planted her flowers."
"Really? Was she . . . mad? I mean, what did your dad say?"
"He said she was totally confused but also, like, elated. Over flowers. That's kind of weird, don't you think? I mean, who would go plant someone else's flowers?"
"She was happy?" A funny feeling spreads through my chest, as if a rush of lighter air is shooting into my lungs.
Jorie tilts her head and half smiles. "Yeah."
I get up and look out Jorie's bedroom window. I have a perfect view of the marigolds, standing straight, reaching toward the sun. And Mrs. Chung was elated, Jorie said. What a great word. "Elated." The opposite of "deflated." How she was before.
"Nina!" Jorie is waving her arms.
"What?"
"Hello? I've been talking to you for the last two minutes. Have you heard anything I've said?"
I grin at her. "Yes, everything." And I did, in the background.
She sighs. "Sometimes I just get the feeling you're not all there."
"I'm here. Of course I'm here."
Jorie pulls a long string of gum from her mouth and winds it around her finger. "I was saying that my mom can drive us on the first day of summer school. I am not walking in by myself, like a loser."
"Okay."
I walk to her shelf and spot the picture frame from her seventh birthday party, decorated with fake jewels, glitter, and foam stars. "You still have this?"
She laughs. "Apparently. I don't know why, though. I was such a dork."
"No, you weren't."
She gets up, takes the frame. "Yes, I was. Look, I couldn't even glue." She points to the dried spots where nothing is glued, then puts the frame back on the shelf, facedown. "Anyway, you know that was a sad birthday for me; we don't need to go there."
"In a way, Jor, it was a great birthday. If you think about it."
She shakes her head. "Uh-uh. Don't do your quality-over-quantity thing."
Jorie had invited the whole class, but just two other girls came besides me. Jorie hadn't known there was going to be another party at the same time. One of the cool girls. So you know how that goes. But the four of us decorated the frames and ate pizza and cake and tie-dyed T‑shirts purple and green. I had a great time, but Jorie cried at the end, after the other two girls left. Told her mom to throw away the T‑shirt and the rest of the cake. Said she was done with birthdays forever.
Jorie is studying a magazine page. "What about this top and shorts for the first day of summer school?"
I nod. "Cute."
"Do you like the crop top?"
"Yeah. That'll look good on you."
She had twenty-five friends at her thirteenth birthday party this year, so (a) she obviously wasn't done with birthdays, and (b) the cool girl who ruined her seventh birthday party was there, and Jorie insisted on sitting next to her at the restaurant.
Jorie stands and reaches for my hands, then examines my fingernails. "What's going on here?" She laughs. "Sit down. Your toenails are fine, but you are in serious need of a manicure."
In five seconds, she has emptied her bag of nail supplies onto the shaggy purple carpet. She picks up my right hand and starts filing. "You really shouldn't let your nails get this bad. I mean, it's important, you know?"
I jump as she nicks a piece of skin.
"Sorry."
"No problem," I say, squirming. "Anything for beauty, right?"
"Absolutely. Sit still." Jorie concentrates intently on the base coat, then two coats of light pink, blowing softly on each nail.
I look at her array of polish colors. "How come you always do pink for me?"
"Because your nails are so short. Can't go too dark. Besides"--she holds out her hands, with beautiful oval nails--"I'm red. You're pink. That's us."
She piles everything back into her bag. "You have to let them dry a good half hour."

Excerpted from The Summer I Saved the World ... in 65 Days by Michele Weber Hurwitz
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

It's summertime, and thirteen-year-old Nina Ross is feeling kind of lost. Her beloved grandma died last year; her parents work all the time; her brother's busy; and her best friend is into clothes, makeup, and boys. While Nina doesn't know what "her thing" is yet, it's definitely not shopping and makeup. And it's not boys, either. Though . . . has Eli, the boy next door, always been so cute?

This summer, Nina decides to change things. She hatches a plan. There are sixty-five days of summer. Every day, she'll anonymously do one small but remarkable good thing for someone in her neighborhood, and find out: does doing good actually make a difference? Along the way, she discovers that her neighborhood, and her family, are full of surprises and secrets.

In this bighearted, sweetly romantic novel, things may not turn out exactly as Nina expects. They might be better.


Praise:
Finalist for the Golden Sower Award (Nebraska)
Nominated for the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards
Nominated for the Sunshine State Young Readers Award (Florida)


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