When Gilah notices a kid falling off his bike and a bus swerv­ing too close, she’s the only one to get the bus dri­ver to stop. The event sparks a friend­ship between Gilah and the bicy­clist, Guiller­mo, a fel­low mid­dle-school­er and Sal­vado­ran Amer­i­can poet who is new to the Wash­ing­ton, DC area.

Penned by two authors, the book alter­nates between Gilah’s and Guillermo’s nar­ra­tives, offer­ing insights into their lives indi­vid­u­al­ly and col­lec­tive­ly. Writ­ten in prose, Gilah’s chap­ters chron­i­cle her bat mitz­vah prepa­ra­tion — where she plans to debut a spe­cial break dance — and her strug­gles and tri­umphs social­iz­ing as a neu­ro­di­ver­gent per­son. Guillermo’s sec­tions, writ­ten in verse, explore his bilin­gual fam­i­ly, his expe­ri­ences at school, his family’s bak­ery, and, ulti­mate­ly, his desire to show­case his poetry.

The struc­ture and use of dual pro­tag­o­nists allow for well-round­ed por­tray­als that bear wit­ness to both char­ac­ters and their fam­i­lies and cul­tures. The authors have seam­less­ly inter­wo­ven Gilah’s and Guillermo’s sto­ries. Read­ers will be root­ing for both char­ac­ters, at Gilah’s bat mitz­vah and beyond.

This is an empa­thet­ic and thought­ful mid­dle-grade sto­ry of friend­ship and com­mu­ni­ty that explores dif­fer­ent ways of nav­i­gat­ing the world.