Melody Brooks is a fifth-grader, nearly 11 years old, who has cerebral palsy. Incredibly intelligent with a near photographic memory, Melody feels trapped in a body that doesn’t work and suffers from the meanness and fear of other people. The book centers on Melody’s growth during a critical year of her childhood, where she starts to come to terms with a condition that will never change and people who will always be afraid and resentful of her. Despite her restrictions and limitations, and in spite of people who don’t believe in her, Melody achieves significant development in character throughout the novel.

At the beginning of the novel, Melody feels like an outsider with no friends, and she has few social interactions. Several things occur to help her interact with the regular school population: she begins attending “inclusion classes,” she gets a motorized wheelchair, and she receives a Medi-Talker computer that allows her to communicate. In many ways, Melody’s development centers around her growing autonomy both physically and psychologically. While she starts out wanting to be like other children and envying their abilities, she begins to enable herself by seeking out ways to communicate and compete. She finds that she’s able to compete with her Whiz Kids peers on equal—if not better—footing and discovers that she’s actually of better character than her cruel teammates at the end of the novel.