BRADY MASON'S PERFECT FIT

An orphan achieves her dream—but can she keep it?

Brady, who’s almost 13, wants to play baseball all summer, while the other girls in the group home are more interested in celebrities and fashion. When Elena Lavigne, the gorgeous editor of a famous fashion magazine, appears on TV and is asked about the baby she gave up for adoption 12 years ago, Brady’s housemates become convinced Brady’s the long-lost heir to her fashion empire. After the girls’ social media posts about this theory go viral, Brady gets the shock of her life: She is in fact “the secret baby of Elena Lavigne.” Brady will do absolutely anything to hold on to her mom and her new life, even if it means forcing herself to be what Elena wants. And Elena, fashionista extraordinaire, obviously wants Brady to be a girly girl. So Brady will sit in the fancy Upper East Side town house, wear the feminine clothes in her massive new closet, and hope Elena never realizes that she’s actually “low-class, and messy, and Jersey, and gay.” With help from soccer-mad Mia, her queer nanny, Brady learns to speak up for herself—and Elena learns to listen and trust. It turns out that even fashion has a place for the butch, sporty queer kid. A strength of the book is the well-developed characterization that goes beneath the surface to explore Brady’s and Elena’s deeper feelings. Main characters read white.

A lovely, heartwarming rags-to-riches story.