Rebecca Stead’s The List of Things That Will Not Change is a family story for 11 year olds built around a notebook a girl was handed the day her parents split up.<\/p>\n
Bea was eight. Her mum and dad sat her down on the sofa for a family meeting, which they had never had before, and she got worried they were going to tell her the cat was dying.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t the cat.<\/p>\n
Afterwards they gave her a green spiral notebook and a green pen, because green is her favourite colour. Inside they’d written a list. Mum loves you more than anything, always. Dad loves you more than anything, always. They still love each other, in a different way. You will always have a home with each of us.<\/p>\n
Bea added her own. Number seven, the cat stays with Mum. Number eight, the rainbow Dad painted over her bed stays where it is.<\/p>\n
She’s twelve when she tells you all this, looking back at the year she was ten. She still carries the notebook everywhere. The edges of the pages have gone curled and grubby.<\/p>\n
That year, Dad sits in her purple chair and tells her he’s going to marry Jesse.<\/p>\n
Bea is pleased. She gets the notebook out and adds number twenty-three. Jesse is staying. Then she jumps up, leans into the hallway and shouts down it to ask whether this means they’re having a wedding.<\/p>\n
What she hasn’t done yet is meet Jesse’s daughter.<\/p>\n
The lovely thing is how ordinary all of it is. Bea gives you her week as a timetable. Monday is a Dad day, Tuesday is a Mum day, and Sunday is entirely its own day. She explains her eczema plainly, including the bit where people ask whether it’s catching. She tells her best friend Angus the whole plot of a Star Trek episode and then admits she cried at the end of it.<\/p>\n
She’s honest about the less lovely bits of herself too. She quietly wanted one of her cousin’s mean nicknames, because at least that meant you were somebody’s.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing if divorce is close to home for your reader. This book doesn’t treat it as a thing that happened once and then mended. It treats it as something you carry about with you and keep a list about. That might be exactly right for your child, or a bit near the bone, and you’ll have a fair idea which.<\/p>\n
Nothing in it is frightening. The hardest moments are a girl working out that her family is a different shape from the one she’d assumed.<\/p>\n
For another daughter caught up in a parent’s new household, try The Boy with the Butterfly Mind, about a girl in Glasgow working desperately hard at being perfect because she’s sure it will bring her dad home from his new family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rebecca Stead’s The List of Things That Will Not Change is a family story for 11 year olds built around a notebook a girl was handed the day her parents split up. Bea was eight. Her mum and dad sat her down on the sofa for a family meeting, which they had never had before, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11067,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8895,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Boy with the Butterfly Mind","lr_seo_hook":"A green notebook of promises, written the day her parents divorced."},"book_tag":[20],"age_group":[28],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[828],"class_list":["post-9194","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-real-life-books","age_group-books-for-11-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-rebecca-stead"],"yoast_title":"The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A green notebook of promises, written the day her parents divorced. For ages 11+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n