A Crooked Kind of Perfectby Linda Urban

Published in 2007. 214 pages.


A Crooked Kind of Perfect is a 2010 Beehive Award Nominee in Children's Fiction, and I found it to be a delightful middle grade novel about 10-year-old girl Zoe, who wants to play the piano.

As an accountant, I found myself relating a little to Zoe's mother, who is a controller. At Career Day, Zoe's mom explained her job this way: "In any organization there are distractions. Personalities. Drama. It is a controller's job to ignore these distractions and focus exclusively on the money" [pages 7-8]. (Boy, she is so right about the drama!)

One passage was just so laugh-out-loud funny:

At our next lesson, Mabelline Person gives me a CD and a stack of Perfectone songbooks: Marvelous Movie Memories, Hits of the Fifties, Hits of the Sixties, Hits of the Seventies, Hits of the Nineties.

"What about the eighties?" I ask.

There were no hits in the eighties," says Miss Person. [page 63]

I highly recommend A Crooked Kind of Perfect!

2010.20