The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen

In this middle grade novel, an autobiography assignment gets truly unreal when a middle schooler and her mischievous grandma run away from home.

Cricket Cohen isn’t a liar, but she doesn’t always tell the exact truth. She loves thinking about geology and astronomy and performing tricky brain surgery on her stuffed animals. She also loves conspiring with Dodo, her feisty grandmother who lives in the apartment right next door.

One Manhattan weekend when she’s in hot water with her teacher and her controlling parents over a fanciful memoir essay, Cricket goes along with Dodo’s questionable decision to hit the bricks. Imagining all sorts of escapades, Cricket is happy to leave home behind. But on a crosstown adventure with an elderly woman who has her own habit of mixing truth and fantasy, some hard realities may start to get in the way of all the fun.

From Catherine Lloyd Burns (The Good, the Bad & the Beagle) comes The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen, an outlandish tale of a grandmother and her granddaughter whose us-against-the-world friendship teaches them both about what it means to tell the truth.

Praise for The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen:

"The ending, Cricket’s poignant rewritten memoir, is realistic but hopeful. May reassure readers with aging relatives facing Alzheimer’s." ―Kirkus Reviews

“Reminiscent of a Kate Di Camillo story relocated to the big city.” ―School Library Journal