Would recommend: YES

This was ridiculously, magically good. I haven't read a youth-intended book that was this good in a very long time. It made me feel like kids will read this book, love it, and tell THEIR kids that this was a book they need to read because they loved it so much. It had a wonderful combination of the mundane life of junior high school in the profound context of the Korean War. At one point, the husband of one of the characters dies in the war, and the teenage narrator of the book says that she made "the sounds of sadness." And when you hear them, you never forget them. Gah, so beautiful.

The reader of the audio version I listened was really, really good, so that helped, and I definitely recommend that version.