During the summer of 1952, eleven-year-old Georgia, who goes by Georgie, moves into a new house and meets Phyllis, the teenage girl next door. Phyllis is not only friendly but beautiful. She is also encased in an iron lung, a victim of polio. Phyllis’s parents talk about her future as if everything is bright and anything is possible, and Phyllis always agrees when they’re around. But when she’s alone with Phyllis, Georgie begins to sense that beneath her seemingly upbeat exterior Phyllis is desperate and unhappy. Phyllis’s growing interest in Georgie’s older brother, Emmett—something Georgie had initially encouraged—begins to worry Georgie as she wonders if Phyllis is motivated by something darker than desire for romance. Does she want Emmett to help her die? Kathryn Lasky’s increasingly tense and beautifully written novel is a wonderful portrait of its time, when the fears surrounding polio limited children’s freedom, especially in summer, and the disease itself forever altered lives. As a narrator Georgie is wise beyond her years, yet Lasky’s story not only works but is a skilled treatment of a psychologically complex topic for its audience. (Ages 10–14)

When a beautiful teen with polio enters their lives, a girl and her older brother find themselves drawn into a web of lies in this compelling novel by a best-selling author.

Eleven-year-old Georgie loves science-fiction movies, but she won’t be going to the theater anytime soon. It’s a hot Indiana summer in 1952, and public places from pools to camps are closing to slow the spread of polio. Despite all the headlines, Georgie never thought she’d come as close to the fearful disease as she does when she spies a silver glint in her neighbor’s yard. There she discovers a monstrous, hissing machine, and inside is Phyllis, a girl encased in an iron lung. "I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world," Phyllis tells her. Phyllis’s ability to breathe may be limited, but her strength to manipulate is boundless. As Georgie struggles to comprehend this once-gorgeous teenager’s life in a "coffin with legs," Phyllis slowly weaves a web of lies that snare all those around her, including Georgie’s quickly smitten brother. Can Georgie untangle the truth before Phyllis’s deception achieves its inevitable end?