Simply Maria | Book Review

Maria Romero is eleven years old, a sixth-grader at Marble City Middle School, and she wants nothing more than to be simply normal—neither a trophy on display nor an object of pity. It's not easy, not with a white cane and books in braille, but she tries. Not easy for a blind girl, but—thanks in large part to an unlikely friendship with the quirky JJ Munson—the thing turns out to be possible. Even in a world as depressingly conformist as ours, you can stay true to yourself, this novel suggests. It's a story about early adolescence, friendship, blindness. And about the beauty of being "weird."