As Simple as It Seems

Moving and funny, this heartwarming and memorable novel follows one girl's discovery that life is not always as simple as it seems.

When Verbena Colter learns the truth about her birth parents — that her dad was a mean and sometimes dangerous person and her mother drank alcohol while she was pregnant — she feels scared and angry. Could it be that Verbie, too, is a terrible person on the inside? Just thinking about it makes Verbie wish she could be someone else entirely. So, when a nervous and allergic-to-almost-everything boy named Pooch becomes her neighbor for the summer and mistakes her for a ghost, Verbie doesn't correct him. Instead, she plays along, convincing him she's a girl who died in the neighborhood pond, and becoming his good (though ghostly) friend. But if Pooch likes Verbie as a ghost, what will he think of Verbie as a living girl? And will he help her discover the truth about the kind of person she is inside?