Squint by Chad Morris & Shelly Brown

Flint is a middle-schooler with an eye condition that forces him to wear glasses, earning him the nickname Squint from his classmates, but even those glasses don't always prevent him from seeing in triple- or quadruple-vision.  Suddenly he has a new friend and he's going on new adventures and he's seeing things in a different light. Squint is the second novel from the Morris/Brown duo and it's absolutely perfection.

Both Squint and his new friend are flawed. They are quite self-obsessed in a way that makes it impossible for them to see problems other people are having or what other people are doing for them. But they are sympathetic in their flawed ways because they have hard lives with problems that people who are much older than them would struggle with.  I have maintained that junior high was a tough time in my life (maybe the toughest) and this novel really gets at why it's so hard. 

There are a lot of comparisons to Wonder by RJ Palacio, which is a novel I also really loved and I thought the comparisons were fair, although maybe it's a bit better than Wonder because the characters seem so much like real children instead of what an author wants children to be like.  If you like Wonder, you'll like this. If you aren't always sold on middle readers, this one might change your mind.  I'm going to keep my eye on the Morris & Brown collab and hope for more great reads out of them.