Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra was a wonderful book on many different levels. First, I'm a geek, and proud to be so. Tess's life is filled with a joy of math and the book is full of little doodles of tangents, parallel lines, Venn diagrams, and all the strange, yet finally comprehensible concepts of algebra. Calculus is a different matter, but luckily it plays no part here. Secondly, after years of hearing about schools with armed guards and metal detectors, Westlake School is exactly like I remember my junior high school. It's refreshing to know that pockets of normality and sanity still exist. Though bullies and cliques were bad enough, I guess I was lucky not to know that it really could be worse.

But Tess isn't looking back fondly. She's smack dab in the middle of eighth grade and suffering all the typical problems. People cheating on tests, backstabbing classmates, the struggle to live up to the trust given when breaking that trust would make your life so much easier. Fortunately, Tess has math to fall back on when she needs a little emotional fortification. And she does need some. Because there's the death next door, which has all the adults in a tizzy and that has a tendency to rock a teenager's world. Adults are suppose to know how to handle things, and when they start to flounder, what hope is there for teens? Then there's the suspicion of cheating on a big test. Tess has seen evidence, but has she seen what she thinks she saw? And if she did, should she tell? Would anyone believe her if she did?

There really isn't much mystery going on here, no sleuthing in the middle of the night with bad guys with guns or anything like that. The mystery is more based on a young girl struggling to understand the truths about the world and her place within it. The people around her aren't good or evil, they just are. And perhaps the most profound of all lessons that algebra teaches her is that sometimes there just isn't and answer. It's not hidden, or too hard, sometimes it just simply doesn't exist. When you're dealing with questions of life and death, that's a hard lesson for many to digest. But with a few doodles and a short explanation from Tess, perhaps some of the glories of eight grade math class will come flooding back, along with memories of those incredibly confusing times and the way it affected our lives for years to come. For the one thing that's absolute about being a teenager ... nobody escapes unchanged.