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Children's Book of the Month

Milo and the Restart Button by Alan Silberberg
Published by Simon and Schuster, 2011

Surviving the year is all Milo has to do. Start to finish in one whole piece. But it's not that simple. It’s not just a new school he's dealing with; it's a new house, a new neighbourhood - a whole new life. And it's one without his mum in it.

After all Milo Cruikshank is not the name of the kid who plays the leading role in the school play, he’s more like the guy who gets to help out backstage and that’s fine with Milo. And because winning doesn’t come easy to him he’s invented a super cool guy in his imagination who will step in when he messes up.

Moving house five times is traumatic by any standards but for the first time this house doesn’t have Mum to say staying home from school is okay sometimes or it quite simply doesn’t have a kitchen full of her.

But the move to House No 5 may not be so bad now that Summer Goodman lives nearby and goes to Milo’s school even if Junior High School is a whole new game.
Not that he’d ever admit it, his neighbour and class mate Hilary Alpert helps him through the fog and his friend One-Eyed Jack is always there for him.

A tangible sadness runs alongside the story under the surface of Milo’s everyday life, a life made bearable by the comforting fog that envelops him every time he teeters on the brink of visiting the sad places of his past.

But visit these places he must and in so doing he comes to terms with his Mum’s death realises he’s OK with being a family of three and remembering they were once four.

Milo and the Restart Button is a realistic, thought-provoking book for confident readers that will take them on a roller coaster ride of emotions ending with a triumphant feeling of hope for the future.