We’ve just finished reading Ingrid Law‘s funny, bittersweet YA novel Savvy with a group of our summer term students. The story features a family in which each member has a quirky, difficult-to-master superpower (always referred to in the book as a savvy
), which usually manifested itself on their thirteenth birthday.
The viewpoint character is a young girl named Mississippi who prefers to be known as Mibs. She turns thirteen near the beginning of the story, very shortly after her father (a savvy-less normal who married into the superpowered clan) is seriously injured in a traffic pileup and left in a coma in a distant hospital. Mibs, hopeful that her savvy can help her to save her father’s life, stows away on a pink school bus driven by a Bible delivery man and embarks on a journey to the hospital with two of her siblings and the local preacher’s kids in tow.
At one point, an adult normal who has joined Mibs and the others on their trip buys Pop-Tarts (Pop-Tarts on Wikipedia), potato chips, and candy bars for everyone to eat. Naturally that prompted our students to ask what Pop-Tarts were and we tracked some down for them to try.
The consensus was that they were pretty darned tasty.