Still a Work in Progress [Hardcover]

In a return to middle-grade fiction, master of perspectives Jo Knowles depicts a younger sibling struggling to maintain his everyday life when his older sister is in crisis.

Noah is just trying to make it through seventh grade. The girls are confusing, the homework is boring, and even his friends are starting to bug him. Not to mention that his older sister, Emma, has been acting pretty strange, even though Noah thought she’d been doing better ever since the Thing They Don’t Talk About. The only place he really feels at peace is in art class, with a block of clay in his hands. As it becomes clear through Emma’s ever-stricter food rules and regulations that she’s not really doing better at all, the normal seventh-grade year Noah was hoping for begins to seem pretty unattainable. In an affecting and realistic novel with bright spots of humor, Jo Knowles captures the complexities of navigating middle school while feeling helpless in the face of a family crisis.Feelings of guilt, grief, bewilderment, and anxiety pervade Noah's present-tense account. Through his eyes, Knowles offers a touching and realistic picture of the effect on those surrounding a person with an eating disorder. A poignant window and mirror into the lives of families affected by a health disorder.
—Kirkus Reviews

Knowles (See You at Harry’s) sensitively explores the pain of having a sibling with an eating disorder, including the exhaustion caused by constant worry, the lack of attention for the healthy child, and the tension at every meal as the family tries to accommodate Emma’s dietary whims while closely monitoring how much she consumes...the relative lack of eating disorder stories told from a male point of view (especially for middle graders) makes this a welcome addition to the canon and a realistic look at how one person’s severe illness can adversely affect everyone around them.
—Publishers Weekly

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