You Only Live Once, David Bravo

Mark Oshiro's You Only Live Once, David Bravo is a funny, big-hearted story for 9 year olds about a boy having the worst start to middle school imaginable.

What happens

David and his best friend Antoine have been together since first grade. They even have a secret handshake that ends "To the end". Then middle school splits them up, with different classes and lunch breaks that barely overlap.

David doesn't like surprises. He overthinks everything (his words, not ours). And his social studies teacher wants everyone to give a short talk about their family and where they come from. David was adopted as a baby and knows almost nothing about his birth parents. He freezes at the front of the class. Then a boy asks whether his parents gave him up because they didn't want him.

After that comes a practice race, a dodgy plate of spinach and a collision on the track that leaves Antoine clutching a swollen ankle. David goes home and lies face down on the hall floor, announcing that he lives there now. Who hasn't had a day like that?

His mum and dad are lovely about it. His mum invents a new unit for measuring misery on the spot (that day scores six hundred Davids). But David still wishes out loud that he could do the whole day again. When he opens his eyes, there's a very odd, almost hairless dog sitting at the bottom of the back steps. And it talks.

The dog is called Fea, and she's there to take David back into his own past so he can change what went wrong. Getting it right turns out to be a lot harder than he thinks.

Reading it is like being inside David's busy head. He's funny even when he's miserable, and the jokes sit right beside the worries. His family feel warm and real too. His mum grew up in Hawai'i and his dad's parents came from Mexico and Brazil, so dinner might be Spam tacos.

If you have an adopted child, the questions David gets asked in class may feel very close to home. The book takes them seriously, and so do his parents, but you might like to read this one alongside them.

What to read next

For another boy starting a new school with a lot going on under the jokes, try Sal and Gabi Break the Universe. Sal is three days into a new school in Miami when a raw chicken turns up in a bully's locker, and nobody can quite explain how it got there.