This book is all about family, grief, finding friendship, and the flair for being different. Yardley is a young girl and she is best friends with her grandmother Gidge. They do everything together, but in the beginning of the book Gidge finds out something terrible, she has cancer. Together they spend time trying to rebuild Gidge's karma before her grand departure from the world in hopes of her being reincarnated. After her passing Yardley is in a tough spot.

Yardley is a little strange, much like Gidge, but she gets through it most the time with the help of her very eccentric family. The book follows her as she learns to live without Gidge, making new friends, and learns about grief and how to overcome it in her day-to-day life.

This was a super sweet book. I laughed and cried with Yardley and her family and felt Gidge around as I read. This book covered some harder lessons for middle grade readers, but did it really well and in a way that was constructive and not overly -explanational. I think that Yardley came to terms with her new life well, I think that younger readers dealing with loss might find this book helpful. ( )

12-year-old Yardley must deal with the death of her grandmother, Gidge. She strongly believes that Gidge will reincarnate, so when a stranger walks through the shop door to pick-up a package left for her by Gidge, Yardley sees a resemblance in her eyes and embarks on a quest to locate this woman to prove to her doubting family and friends that Gidge has returned.
There are good plot twists and strong main characters in this story, even if Yardley's stage actor parents are a bit quirky. I would recommend this book to middle school readers with a note that it does deal with the sensitive topic of MAID and describes Midge's death in detail. ( )

The bond between grandmother and granddaughter is so strong that Yardley is sure her GG has been reincarnated. The search for GG takes Yardley on a tremendous, heart warming journey. An awesome book

When Yardley O’Hanlon’s beloved grandmother and best friend, Gidge, is diagnosed with cancer, the whole family knows their precious time with her is limited. Gidge is the type of person who likes to live life to the fullest. So when her body has had enough, Gidge knows it’s time to go. Yardley struggles to let go, but she holds fast in her belief that Gidge will return soon via reincarnation.

When she’s not working at the Over Easy Vintage Emporium, a used clothing store, Yardley looks for Gidge everywhere. One day a stranger arrives to pick up a prize. When the stranger opens the package she is shocked to discover a dress, and not just any dress either. It was a special dress Gidge only wore once. In that moment Yardley recognizes something familiar in the stranger, and everything goes haywire.

With a terrified customer, broken clues, and letters arriving from the deceased, Yardley must decipher what Gidge is trying to tell her from beyond. However, she can’t solve this on her own. Believing in good Karma, Yardley reluctantly opens her heart to form a new friendship with a troubled boy named Harris. Together they search for Gidge and find answers in surprising places.

The Bottom Line: While this book is a mystery, it’s definitely not what I expected. After a slow and sad beginning, the pace picks up as the main character grapples with feelings of grief and confusion as she tries to process the loss of her grandmother. Thankfully, the addition of other characters like Con and Harris add to the mystery as Yardley learns about family, friendship, and keeping secrets. Although geared towards kids ages 10 and up, there are some mature themes including euthanasia, illness, death, and cancer. Thus, I would recommend parents read along with their kids and discuss. [Note: Canada has different laws regarding euthanasia than the U.S., so this book might be better suited towards Canadian readers or readers in U.S. states where euthanasia is allowed.] This review also appears at the Mini Book Bytes Book Review Blog. ( )

A Green Velvet Secret by Vicki Grant (2023) is a Canadian middle grade book about the bond between Yardley (YaYa) and her grandmother (Gidge). Unfortunately Gidge has terminal cancer and soon Yardley and her parents are on their own, with just letters written by Gidge to serve as guidance and support.

Typically a middle grade novel, unless it's one that's set during a holiday trip or involves nomadic people, features some time at school. Or at least, interactions with school children. Sometimes it can seem that a book is set too much at school.

Here, though, Yardley seems to live in a vacuum. Beyond a brief description of her home, the thrift store where she ends up working, the hospital, the graveyard, and the Pit of Despair, there's nothing else to her world. There isn't even a good sense of how these settings connect together except vaguely by bus and scooter.

The people in Yardley's life are few and far between too. There are her parents who get a brief description early on and then are just sort of in the wings. There's of course Gidge who is the driving force of the novel, alive and even dead. There is the adult and the teenaged boy who also work at the thrift shop. And finally there's the woman who is given the titular green velvet dress. That's it.

The other people in Yardley's life seem to be as disjointed and disconnected from any greater reality as the places she visits. Save for a brief bit of characterization near the end, not much is said or learned about any of the living people.

But the thing that ultimately didn't work for me is Yardley's naiveté. She goes through the vast majority of the book believing in reincarnation, in the form often used in isekai stories in anime/manga where a dead person is transported to another world fully formed and very much alive, albeit often in a different body. Though there is nothing to the book to support Yardley's conviction, she repeatedly sees her dead grandmother in others she meets.

My initial review on finishing the book sums up my feelings. "Yardley, aka YaYa is so stubbornly naive all the way through. She out-pollyannas Pollyanna." ( )