Flipped

Bryce Loski and Juli Baker tell the same six years twice, a chapter each, and almost nothing lands the same way in both accounts. The hand she took the day his family moved in, the sycamore she would not climb down from, the eggs she carried across the street for two years — each is generosity in her telling and an ordeal in his. Wendelin Van Draanen’s novel is a study in how two honest witnesses can watch the same moment and carry away different things, and in what it costs either of them to look again.