Book Review: Fish in a Tree, by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, awards and honors listed below,* 276 pages, published October, 2020, Lexile 550, recommended for ages 9-11 or grades 3-7. Please note: this book is in the Pageturner library but is currently available for only for two classes. It will require student requests for additional purchases to be made. 

This novel is appropriate for grade 3 and up but is recommended variably online for grades 6-8, I'm not sure why. There are always reviewers who monitor student books rather conservatively for content, but there's really nothing worrisome here: the novel is about a highly intelligent 6th grader with dyslexia, a common syndrome for many students in these very age brackets--why keep it from them when it might actually be useful in helping students to be more socially aware and compassionate? 

For years, Ally's been very cleverly fooling teachers into thinking she can read. We're immediately introduced to her ongoing frustration and self-castigation, in first person narrative, on page 1:
 
 "It’s always there. Like the ground underneath my feet. ‘Well, Ally? Are you going to write or aren’t you?’  Mrs. Hall asks. If my teacher were mean it would be easier. ‘C’mon,’ she says.  ‘I know you can do it.’ What if I told you that I was going to climb a tree using only my teeth? Would you say I could do it then?... Mrs. Hall sighs. ‘C’mon, now. I’m only asking for one page describing yourself.’ I can’t think of anything worse than having to describe myself. I’d rather write about something more positive. Like throwing up at your own birthday party.”  

This notion of a fish in a tree will be repeated throughout; it's a great way to indicate just how ‘out of water’ Ally feels. (I remember a poignant line from Drew Barrymore's 1998 film Ever After, when Cinderella asks the visiting famous courtier and artist Leonardo da Vinci, "A fish may love a bird, m'sieur, but where would they live?" The social hierarchy of the time mandated that no one of royalty could marry a commoner, and Cinderella loved a prince-soon-to-be king. My mind wanders, and I wonder if Hunt had also seen that movie before writing this book. In Ally’s own imagined hierarchy--continually supported in real life--she’s at the bottom just like  Cinderella, because she can’t imagine a better life for herself. And yet Cinderella wins, while Ally can’t see anything remotely similar in her own future.)

Ally describes her undiagnosed dyslexia succinctly:

"Seven schools in seven years and they’re all the same. Whenever I do my best, they tell me I don’t try hard enough. Too messy. Careless spelling. Annoyed that the same word is spelled different ways on the same page. And the headaches. I always get headaches from looking at the brightness of dark letters on white pages for too long...I pull out a book and open it, but the letters squiggle and dance. How are other people able to read letters that move?" In her afterword, Hunt reveals that she learned how dyslexia actually feels from her brother; she modeled Ally's brother Travis--who is also dyslexic--after him. So the truthfulness in this novel rings loud and clear: “Reading for me is like when I drop something and my fingers scramble to catch it and just when I think I’ve got it, I don’t. If trying to read helped, I’d be a genius.”

Not even Ally’s mother gets what her daughter is going through, so she is unable to help her daughter cope:

“ ‘By the way, I don’t want to hear you say that people hate you,’ she calls out. ‘How could anyone on earth possibly hate you?’ I wish she could understand my world. But it would be like trying to explain to a whale what it’s like to live in the forest.’ “  One of the best things about this book, I love the author’s use of figurative language in innovative similes!
 
 Ally provides an excellent perspective about how we tend to judge people who seem different than we are. It's a good lesson for all of us:
 
 "People act like the words “slow reader” tell them everything that’s inside. Like I’m a can of soup and they can just read the list of ingredients and know everything about me. There’s lots of stuff about the soup inside that they can’t put on the label, like how it smells and tastes and makes you feel warm when you eat it. There’s got to be more to me than just a kid who can’t read well." How much wiser we'd all be, if only we understood that mere ingredients don't tell us much about how a dish tastes, or that a casual acquaintance can’t tell us much about who any person really is.

After seven years, Ally finally gets a teacher who's learning about dyslexia himself. As a teacher, he thinks outside the box--and soon realizes Ally's tremendous capacity to do the same. Mr. Daniels introduces her to the game of chess after school, thinking she must surely have the astute spatial awareness necessary for the game of strategy. Sure enough, by the second game she takes his queen. Soon she beats him at his own game, because she can see the board in her mind's eye, even to how it will look several steps ahead. When she asks whether he let her win, he frankly tells her he has three brothers and it’s not in his nature to lose by choice! 

As it turns out, Mr. Daniels is also still in school, studying to become an expert in teaching dyslexic students. He helps Ally in ways most teachers wouldn’t ever consider in the absence of specialized training few teachers have time or money for, such as: having her write in shaving cream, or with different colors representing various letters. I particularly appreciated how his own further education is fostering hers. By herself, she soon realizes that if she can get the first two and the last two letters of a word, she can probably guess, with context, what the word is. And that usually works! "This trick I’ve discovered made Mr. Daniels say I’m a genius."
 
 Along the way, Ally must also learn how to deal with bullies like mean girl Shay, whose own mother has ineptly trained her to believe she is nothing if not always the best--you end up almost sorry for the girl. I write "almost" because Shay never actually gives up, but must eventually be defeated/demoted? by their entire class. Thankfully, Ally also finds “allies” (yes, I borrowed that from the author), despite her misgivings:

“ ‘Come on, Ally. Who wants to fit in with people like Shay and her worse-than-awful friends? Thankfully we’ll never fit in with people like that.” Keisha laughs again. “One thing’s for sure. We’re not gonna fit in, but we’re gonna stand out. All three of us. You wait and see. You’re going to be a famous artist and Albert is going to cure cancer or invent talking fish or something.’ ‘Talking fish? What would they say? ‘Please don’t fry me’?”

Mr. Daniels teaches Ally not to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, while at the same time Ally shows us how remarkably adaptive and truly creative her mind is:
 
 “ ‘…[I]f you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking that stupid.’” I think hard about that. Could it be that simple? A mind movie flickers in my brain of an angry fish at the bottom of a tree, banging on the trunk with its fins and complaining that it can’t climb it. I think of a turtle making a sandwich. A snake playing the violin. An elephant knitting. Penguins playing basketball. An eagle scuba diving. But mostly I hope with every tiny bit of myself that Mr. Daniels is right about all of this.”  (A knitter myself, I loved Hunt’s thought of an elephant knitting, which absolutely requires dexterous fingers elephants lack more than most species.)

In the end, Ally transforms, as she says, "from invisible to invincible:" Things are going to be different. It’s like birds can swim and fish can fly. Impossible to possible." Gotta love a story with such a positively happy ending!

*Children's Crown Award, 2017, Winner
 Children's Crown Award, 2018, Winner
 Crystal Kite Member Choice Award, 2016, Winner, New England
 Cybils Awards, 2015, Nominee, Middle Grade Fiction
 Goodreads Choice Award, 2015, Nominee, Middle Grade
 Great Lakes Great Books Award, 2016-2017, Winner, Grades 4-5
 Lectio Book Award, 2017, Honor, Grades 4-8
 Maine Student Book Award, 2017, 2nd Place
 Massachusetts Children's Book Award, 2018, Honor Book
 Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award, 2019, 3rd Place, Division I
 Pennsylvania Young Readers' Choice Award, 2016-2017, Winner, Grades 6-8
 Schneider Family Book Award, 2016, Winner, Middle
 William Allen White Children's Book Award, 2018, Winner, Grades 3-5