This was a fun, fable-like story about personal demons, personal powers, and family love, with a highly enjoyable writing style. Mibs is about to turn 13 and discover her "savvy," or special power. Her brothers have already found out their savvies (causing hurricanes and creating electricity). When her father is injured in a terrible car accident, Mibs hopes her savvy will be something that can save him. She ends up stowed away with the preacher's kids in a big pink bus full of bibles that is supposed to go to the city where the hospital is...but instead turns the opposite way. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "We all stood and looked sadly at our own lovely house as though we'd just found out that a grizzly bear had moved in and pulled all the stuffing from the furniture and torn all the pictures from the walls and eaten all the special-occasion mini-marshmallows from the high top shelf above the refrigerator while we were gone." 
 "...his voice [was:] galled and glum yet surprisingly tuneful, like a country western singer yodeling from atop a cactus." 
 "...his combed-over hair [was:] flapping madly like a grocery sack on a barbed wire fence." 
 "Lester might not have looked the part of a hero, but I supposed you never can tell right off who might have a piece of Prince Charming deep down inside." 
 "'Kids and pools...well, they're like birds and sky, aren't they?'" 
 "Maybe it's like that for everyone, I thought. Maybe we all have other people's voices running through our heads all the time. I thought how often my poppa and momma were there inside my head with me, telling me right from wrong. Or how the voices of Ashley Bing and Emma Flint sometimes got stuck under my skin, taunting me and making me feel low, even when they weren't around. I began to realize how hard it was to separate out all the voices to hear the single, strong one that came just from me." 
 "I couldn't fathom it myself, but I guessed that happy endings came in all shapes and sizes." 
 "I felt sick over his willingness to allow that kind of talk in his own head, and I vowed that I would never let...anybody else have that kind of power over me." 
 "Carlene turned out to be a big woman in a little woman's body. She had big hair, big teeth, big long fingernails, and big fuzzy slippers, but the rest of her was hollow and shrunken and bony. She looked like a witch dressed up for Halloween as a movie star." 
 "You never can tell when a bad thing might make a good thing happen."