Tumble

Celia C. Pérez's Tumble is a big-hearted family story for 10 year olds about a girl whose stepdad wants to adopt her, just as she starts wondering about the father she doesn't know.

What happens

Addie is twelve and lives in a small New Mexico town where wrestling is a very big deal. Her stepdad Alex runs the local diner. He's a massive wrestling fan, with a shelf of action figures and a signed photo of André the Giant above the grill. He's also funny and kind and cooks a great scrambled egg.

On her birthday he asks if he can adopt her. Addie loves him. But she has a question nobody will answer. Who is her real dad? Her mum won't talk about him at all.

So Addie goes looking. With her best friend Cy, she hunts through her mum's things and finds an old photo tucked inside a box of toddler shoes. It's her mum as a teenager, a boy in school tracksuit bottoms, and baby Addie peeping out from his arm.

It's a proper bit of detective work after that, with a magnifying glass borrowed from the science cupboard! And the trail leads, eventually, to a whole family of lucha libre wrestlers.

What makes it lovely is how real Addie's feelings are. She roots for the wrestler who always loses, because somebody has to. She keeps saying she's "fine" when she isn't (her mum does exactly the same, which drives them both mad). And she feels a bit like a stranger in the mirror, with half a face she can't place.

The side characters are brilliant fun. Cy turns up to school in Cleopatra braids with a stack of homemade oracle cards. Marlene, the tiny old waitress, shouts orders in diner slang. Did you know "hope" means oatmeal? And there's a new boy in class who won't talk to anyone.

It's gentle, but it's honest about grown-ups. Addie realises her mum has been lying to her, even if it's for reasons she doesn't understand yet. If you've got a child in a blended family, it could open up some good conversations.

What to read next

For more from the same author, try The First Rule of Punk. Malú has to leave her dad and his record shop behind and move to Chicago with her mum. She deals with it by making zines, little homemade magazines she cuts and glues herself.