Finding the perfect snowflake could solve the perfect crime.

“Saloma Hammond is not your typical twelve year old. Sal counts her steps between classes, wears a school uniform that isn’t required, and prefers to stay locked inside her tightly controlled OCD world. But when the lure of the perfect snowflake entices her to join the Weather Club, her anti-social shell begins to crack. At the same time, dozens of phones have gone missing, and her classmates are getting suspicious. If Sal can unlock her pattern-driven mind to identify the workings of the real thief, and then set an irresistible trap at the Science Fair, she may just learn how powerful friendship can be.”

This middle grade novel about a girl with OCD who learns to make friends and analyze snowflakes and solve crimes is the first of several middle grade books released by a new small press, Chicken Scratch Books. The mission of Chicken Scratch is “to be a company whose focus is quality literature for kids.” You can read more about that mission here. Suffice it to say, the publisher has made a good start with Kiri Jorgensen’s book, Perfect.

Saloma is a great protagonist, sweet, kind, a rule-follower, and someone who lives inside her own tightly drawn boxes, but thinks outside the boxes of others. It’s fun to read about how she manages to shift and change over the course of a school semester and all because of snowflakes and the Weather Club. The book references lots of meteorological science, and my very nonscientific brain was intrigued. It made me want to go back and reread Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, a biography of the scientist Wilson Bentley who first developed a way to photograph individual snowflakes.

Chicken Scratch Books has only been in existence for about a year, and they have already published several middle grade fiction novels. I’ve only read Perfect, but if it’s an example of the kind of work this publisher is putting out, I’m all in, so to speak. I will be reading more books from this start-up publishing company.