She simply keeps things secret that she shouldn’t bother keeping secret. The tagline of the novel is “How do you find your voice when your family isn’t listening?” The problem with that is that when Thyme talks, her family does listen. is something that kids are expected to do even if they don’t have a sick brother.She gets a full hour for unloading the dishwasher. Plus, Thyme gets lots of time for doing easy activities that she should be doing anyway. We are told over and over again that Thyme gets overlooked and ignored, but we rarely see it. The problem with this is that Thyme gets plenty of time to herself and plenty of time with her parents even without “spending” any of what she’s collected. When Thyme collects time, she can use it for personal time as long as there is no Val-related emergency that prevents it.

They eat dinner with the kids almost every night (they don’t cook it, but they’re definitely there to eat it). They regularly make time for marathon game nights. Owens are quite present in their children’s lives. Thyme complains that her parents-and particularly her mother-never have time for her, but in actuality Mr. For that reason, Thyme’s parents do not come across the way they’re supposed to. When a parent does anything in a middle grade novel, it’s unusual. They are either dead, negligent, or missing. Anyone who has ever read a middle grade novel can tell you that parents are absent as a rule.

Part of that is the fault of Counting Thyme itself, and part of it comes from conventions of juvenile fiction. The time-collection plotline does not work for me. Luckily, she has a plan: collect enough personal time-promised to her whenever Val’s treatments distract her parents from paying attention to Thyme-to go home early. Although Thyme loves her brother, she is sad to leave her home, her grandmother, and her best friend Shani. Counting Thyme by Melanie Conklin follows eleven-year-old Thyme Owens, who-along with her family-moves from California to New York so that her younger brother, Val, can get into a drug trial that will hopefully help him overcome his nerve cancer.