While attending a prestigious performing arts school, Julia envisioned herself as a prima ballerina with the Kansas City ballet, but her dream caved in under the reality of her anorexia. Now she is living under the watchful eye of her parents and taking life one bite at a time as a junior-high guidance counselor. Her feelings of failure threaten to overwhelm her until she meets a special student, Dell, a musical virtuoso with little formal education living with foster parents who have no idea of the difficulty Dell has fitting in with the school's wealthy and intolerant students. Together, Julia and Dell confront the establishment. Wingate continues Dell's story from The Language of Sycamores 0 (2005), producing another winner. --Patty Engelmann Copyright 2006 Booklist

A former ballet dancer and recovering bulimic helps herself by helping others in this clunky morality tale from Wingate (Over the Moon at the Big Lizard Diner). Ex-ballerina Julia takes a job as a guidance counselor at a middle school for gifted children, where she quickly becomes suspicious that Harrington students are using drugs (the shocking truth: they are). Julia quickly finds a raison d'etre in Dell, a piano prodigy and the orphan child of a heroin-addicted mother whose foster parents are keen but whose GPA is in the gutter. Dell gets Julia involved in an after-school program for under-privileged kids, while Julia helps Dell improve her grades. Meanwhile, Julia's unattached sister gets unexpectedly pregnant-and Julia learns that her family thinks about more than her eating disorder. Julia's real lesson comes, though, when she's fired for refusing to recant or apologize for accusing a Harrington student of using drugs. There are many life lessons in this trite, feel good novel, though adult readers will have learned them a long time ago. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.