What is “Normal” Anyway?

When Wesley King’s OCDaniel first arrived on bookshelves it was a revelation. It was one of an extremely limited selection of titles for middle graders with a main focus or theme of mental health. It is an extremely important book, normalizing feelings that many young people face and helping them to acknowledge when perhaps they need help. In that book was a compelling character in Sara Malvern, a quirky girl in Daniel’s grade who doesn’t say much and is horribly bullied, so much so that she doesn’t really speak to anyone.

Fast forward four years and we get a tons more insight into Sara in the wonderfully charming Sara and the Search for Normal. This story was achingly beautiful. The writing was so compelling it was impossible not to empathize with Sara and go through all the ups and downs with her. We all have that desire or drive to be accepted, especially in middle school, the tumultuous hormonal years of incredible self discovery. Sara has several mental health disorders to cope with in top of being in middle school and she desperately wants to be “normal”. She is such an intuitive character, recognizing when others need help. She does it with her first friend Erin and again with Daniel, yes Daniel from OCDaniel garners a few mentions in the story.

Wesley King has written about friendship in such an incredibly real way. As a male author he was really able to bring female friendships to life and made me remember my sometimes rocky middle school friendships.

I loved everything about this book! It is clearly a vitally important story for our middle schoolers to access so they can feel seen and a little more “normal” because everyone’s perception of normal is different and terribly overrated.