A good story, with believable characters facing real-life situations that a lot of kids can relate to.  The story is told from the perspective of its 10-year-old main character, Piper Lee DeLuna.  Piper’s mom is getting ready to get married again, but Piper is not too happy about it, partly because she’s not especially fond of the girl about to become her stepsister, partly because she doesn’t want to give up the hope that her father might still be alive (his body was never recovered from a plane crash), and partly because she doesn’t want to share her mom.  Throughout the story, Piper makes  a lot of not-so-smart decisions that lead to near disasters, but because it’s told from her perspective the reader gets to see why they all seemed like reasonable ideas at the start, until they never turn out the way she’d hoped.