Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was a cute middle grade story about a girl named Sweet Pea. Her parents have just told her they are getting divorced because her dad has recently come out as gay. Along with that her dad is moving out, but only one house down the street; The house in between is Miss Flora Mae's, the towns advice columnist. While dealing with her family troubles, Sweet Pea is also dealing with the struggles of being "the weird girl" in seventh grade. That doesn't stop her stride though, it's her ex-best-friend Kiara, who all the sudden cares about boys and lipgloss, that has her down. But she has Oscar and her cat Cheese to get her through these weird times.
This really is a good premise for a middle grade story. A girl who is dealing with a divorce, public embarrassment, and friend troubles, is tasked with helping out her next door neighbor, Miss Flora Mae, with her advice column while she is out of town. Miss Flora Mae had originally planned for Sweet Pea to take care of her plants and forward her the letters, but one day Sweet Pea got a taste of what it was like to help people with their problems when she opened one of the letters. From there the story goes on. But only kind of in my opinion. More than half the story was us learning about the characters and what is happening. The "beginning" was so tragically slow that I felt unmotivated to pick it up, but as soon as I finally got past the building of the story it got better. Too bad that it was only the last 75-100 pages of the book where it actually got interesting. Plus, the ending felt rushed like the author had also gotten bored of explaining to us and just wanted to finish the book. If it this story had been explained in a shorter amount of time, this could've been a lot better.
I also had a problem with Sweet Pea. While I understand she is still going through the growing pains of being a seventh grader, she still does seem really immature and young for that age. Plus she is horrible to all of the people she considers close friends, I know that was supposed to be the point of the story, in a way, but even after she realized she did it to Kiera, she did it to Oscar and even the side character Greg. Like, she knew what she was doing and even recognized it, but didn't take the time to figure out what is making her do that and how to stop. Also how Sweet Pea handled a lot of the problems she was going through was just not realistic. I do not know anyone who would just call out someone they used to consider their best friend in the middle of seventh grade lunch, like that would be the end of you; good bye. I get that maybe this fits Sweet Pea being the weird girl but still, too me it just seems like too much.
Also although Sweet Pea fully admits that she is an overweight girl at the beginning of the book, that never really pans out or is mentioned in full again, except for close to the end when Kiera is dabbing the grease off her pizza. Which some people find disgraceful, but honestly I could care less. Anyways, I just expected this to be more empowering for overweight girls but it wasn't like that at all. It was like the author wanted to say they had an overweight main character and not include that detail at all throughout the story. There really wasn't a point to it if it wasn't going to be mentioned again.