The Swift Boys & Me by Kody Keplinger (review)

“All three of the Swift boys were my best friends, but Canaan was my best-best friend.” So says twelve-year-old Nola about the boys on the other side of her duplex wall, who’ve been her inseparable pals for years, with age-mate Canaan her automatic partner, buddy, and protector at school. Now Mr. Swift has left the family and the Swift boys’ world is crashing down around them, taking Nola’s with it. Oldest brother Brian leaves the house, little Kevin hangs desperately around Nola’s, and Canaan takes up with the boys he’s always derided as bullies; meanwhile, Nola struggles to define a summer without her usual companions and finds better friendships than she expected in Felicia and in Teddy, who has awkwardly liked Nola but was afraid of Canaan. Keplinger’s first middle-grades novel is sweet and smooth, and sharp readers will realize that it’s as much about change in general as Nola’s drift from the Swift boys. Nola, for instance, ends up getting closer to her grumpy grandmother as a result of her desire to find Mr. Swift, and she adjusts to her family’s planned move out of her beloved duplex. Nola’s small Kentucky town, with kids pelting indiscriminately from yard to yard under the gently watchful eye of all the neighborhood adults, seems an old-fashioned idyll, but the multiracial cast, contemporary technology, and occasional helicopter parent put it firmly in the present day. This is the sort of solid, amiable preteen summer story there used to be a lot of; let’s hope this heralds a revival.