A 12-Year-Old Gymnast Heals After a Coach’s Sexual Abuse

Children’s Books In Kate Messner’s resonant, necessary CHIRP (Bloomsbury, 227 pp. , $16. 99; ages 8 to 12), 12-year-old Mia is on the mend — from a broken arm, after a fall from the balance beam, and more slowly, from the psychic scars left by a predatory coach. Mia’s family is moving back to Vermont to support her grandmother, an entomology professor turned cricket farmer and an evangelist for the sustainable if unconventional protein.

Recovering from a stroke, Gram is another woman on the mend — and she is also convinced that someone is trying to sabotage her cricket farm. Unlike her mother, Mia believes Gram, and sets out to figure out what’s going on. Mia and her friends satisfyingly solve the mystery, and secure the business’s future while they’re at it. These interludes are charming, especially the Chirp Challenge, where the kids persuade newbies to try the flavored crickets (Maple!

Crispy Cajun! ) and to post selfies with the hashtag. But the mystery takes a back seat to the slow, two-steps-forward, one-step-back nature of healing itself. No neat resolution can change the fact that this once-fearless girl is inexorably changed.

The Mia we meet is muted — dulled and diminished by what has happened to her. We get to know her through a box of photographs and mementos that she unpacks in her new bedroom. Watching her begin to light up again, largely through contact with the other female characters, is one of the novel’s real pleasures.

“She borrows swagger from her adventurous new friend Clover, and solves the mystery with the help of another, the robot wrangler Anna.”

She is inspired by a businesswoman who mentors her entrepreneurs’ camp, especially after the woman shares her #MeToo story. And Mia’s lovely connection with the high-energy, no-nonsense Gram is a source of sweetness throughout, even as the older woman withstands her own gaslighting. Messner is the author of over 30 books for young readers, including “The Seventh Wish,” and her quiet authority is the perfect match for this material; right from the beginning, we know we’re in good hands. Without a whiff of sentimentality, Messner shows how the violation has systematically eroded Mia’s sense of herself.