In the latest chapter book about Amber Brown, she is going through a growth spurt and is enjoying fourth grade, but her divorced parents are behaving like children in their telephone battles about their joint custody of her. She hates feeling split between them. She also hates, hates, hates her new haircut. She likes her mother's fiance, but she worries about her loyalty to her dad, who is coming back from Europe to live near her. The first-person, present-tense narrative gets exactly right the fourth-grader's mix of feelings, her focus on the trivial, the gross, and the essential. Readers will welcome the combination of farce and tenderness, the honesty about anger and hurt and love. (Reviewed May 15, 1997)

In this fifth book about the spunky and sophisticated Amber, Amber's father returns from France; her parents' immature, although realistic, bickering escalates; and Amber continues to get used to her mother's fiancé, Max. The plot is predictable and less fresh than in the earlier books, but still believable and quite contemporary. Black-and-white drawings are included.