Starting second grade mere days after taking a nasty spill at the Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota, Billy worries he might not be up to the challenge of a higher grade than he's ever been in before. Billy Miller is early on in his journey toward this realization. You look up one day and there's a fully developed, satisfying life around you, which you never realized your mundane everyday was leading to. The Year of Billy Miller is Kevin Henkes at his most Margaret-Wise-Brown-like, a wholly unspectacular story that makes its mark not with cleverness of plot, emotional intensity, or mind-bending literary innovation, but by building steadily on the little moments of life that grow from seedlings into a grand forest of memories, so gradually that we're not sure in retrospect how it happened.
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