Her parents send her from Long Island to a posh private girls’ boarding school in Maine where she encounters the stuffy elitism of rich girls and stiff schoolmarms focused on what one teacher talks about, speaking in all caps to the girls: Resolution and Overcoming Obstacles and Accomplishment. "It was if Absence had moved into the room and taken up all of the air.” Meryl Lee has lost a friend to death, and faces “The Blank,”missing him so much. What do they say about great minds, again? When I was done I texted K that I read the whole book as Schmidt working through his own grief through the character of Meryl Lee Kowalski and she said she thought ALL of the books written after his wife’s death were essentially about his dealing with his grief. Schmidt’s wife Anne died eight years ago, leaving him to continue raising their six (!) children. I was alerted to this book being published by friend Kristen, and immediately got it and began reading. All of them balance lighthearted fun with kids dealing with serious issues. Just Like That is the third in the loosely connected wonderful middle grades trilogy by Gary Schmidt, after Wednesday Wars and Okay For Now. It reminds me of Grace Paley’s title Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Boom, and just like that, they fell in love, or just like that, he died. Just Like That is a kind of vaguely familiar English catch-phrase. “Good books have questions for us to ponder.
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