Auggie Pullman is starting school for the first time -- as a fifth grader (which is middle school, in this book). This is a big deal for a kid who's been homeschooled his whole life due to severe facial deformities and many surgeries. The book chronicles his fifth-grade year and how it changes him, his family, his classmates, and his community. 
 More than writing sensitively about a difference or disability (which it does well, a la Out of My Mind), or showing the effects on family members (Rules), this story became magical to me the first time it changed point of view. You hear overlapping versions of events to reveal the reasons that characters act as they do; or, as the school principal says, "there are almost always more than two sides to every story." 
 It was strangely thrilling to read a story with so many modern details (Bone, Star Wars, the Cheese Touch, KidzBop, UglyDolls, iPods, cell phones), but I wonder if these will date the book too quickly. (As an aside, when a character uses her phone to call her mom from the bathroom for a ride home from a bad party, saying 'don't ring the bell, just text and I'll come out,' I spent several minutes thinking about this and how getting out so gracefully would have been impossible pre-cell phones.) I loved Auggie's strong, loving, functional family. So many kids' books are about dealing with one's crappy family that this was refreshing. Also, the depiction of bullying in middle school seemed dead-on. This, plus the short chapters, unique format, unusual protagonist, and (perhaps slightly too) happy ending, make this a "tolerance" book with actual high kid appeal -- a hard balance to strike, for sure. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "I don't know if the three of us found each other because we were so alike in so many ways, or that because we found each other, we've become so alike in so many ways." 
 "My mother is the kind of person who has a happy face for the rest of the world but not a lot left over for me." 
 "'Shall we make a new rule of life...always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?'" --J.M. Barrie