My Diary from the Edge of the World (Jodi Lynn Anderson)

My Diary from the Edge of the World
Jodi Lynn Anderson
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Gracie Lockwood's an ordinary - if boisterous - girl living an ordinary American life, going to school and annoying her siblings and tuning out lessons on math and science and the sasquatches that helped end the American Civil War. Then the Dark Cloud appears... and it soon becomes clear that the death omen has come for someone in her family: her sickly kid brother Sam. Nothing can stop a Cloud once it's come, but Dad has a plan. He, like a scant handful of mostly-crackpot believers, is convinced that another world, the Extraordinary World, lies beyond the icebound southern edge of the flat Earth. It'll be a one-way trip, but if he's right, the Cloud couldn't possibly follow them that far. Soon Gracie, Mom, Dad, Sam, teen sister Millie, and orphaned neighbor boy Oliver (who tags along at the last minute, for his own reasons) are piled into an old Winnebago, on the road trip of a lifetime... but can anyone ever outrun Death itself?

REVIEW: I was attracted by the interesting alternate world (though it pushes the logic line, even for a middle-grade title, for a world so different from ours that poltergeists shut down World War I before it could even begin to have the same named celebrities and other identical cultural features), and admittedly by the fact that the dragon silhouetted against the moon on the cover reminded me of Toothless. The story, though, doesn't quite pull together like it seems it should. Gracie starts out immature, impatient, and more than a touch selfish (as one might expect for her age), and while her experiences teach her much about the importance of family and appreciating the wonders, ordinary and extraordinary, all around us, she never contributes much more to the book than recording events in her diary. Most everyone else steps up at some point, but Gracie's one tangible contribution is, literally, a tantrum. I don't know why this started bugging me, but it did, especially given how much growth other characters underwent - not to mention how it ended (no specific spoilers, sorry, but suffice it to say it seemed like an awful long way to go given where they wound up.)
Gracie's world is an interesting place to visit, with wonders and terrors and moments of whimsy, but I don't miss it now that I've left. I should not be thinking that about a world where dragon migrations drive the population underground for weeks at a time, but I do, and that's another part of how this book lost its full fourth star in the ratings. That, and the letdown of an ending...

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