"I want to be a fortune teller, like for my job one day, Nora said curled up tight in the corner of Bea's top bunk bed."

Nora, Bea and Millie were inseparable after they met on the first day of kindergarten at Shire School in Manhattan's Upper East Side. In third grade, they began making Fortune Tellers with their Write Your Destiny markers, special markers that seemed to make their messages come magically true. The trio shared sleepovers, skate parties, and celebrated every birthday together, until the day their friendship came to an end just before sixth grade.

A rift formed when Bea and Nora, attended a classmates birthday party and Millie was excluded. Following the birthday incident, the Pandemic began, and their cherished school closed, which led to them being separated. Millie's father quit his job as the super at an apartment complex and found a new job managing cottages in the country. Nora's parents divorced, leading to her and her sister Penelope living with their mom, seeing their dad only occasionally. And Bea's family moved to a bigger house to support her Aunt Claire, who suffers from uncontrollable seizures and requires constant monitoring. Both Bea and her twin, Danny assist their mom with keeping an eye on their aunt.

While cleaning out her desk and getting ready for the first day of a new school year, Bea discovers a fortune teller. She thought she had discarded them all after their fight. They made hundreds of them before, yet she's pretty sure she ripped all of hers to pieces. Soon Nora and Millie also find fortune tellers, with messages of encouragement, or just the right words that they seem to need to hear. Their fortunes used to be silly, but now the messages are serious, appearing in the least expected places. Why is it that they suddenly reappeared so mysteriously after all these years?

Bea and Nora receive an unexpected surprise from their former teacher, Ms. Steinhaur, a box filled with fortune tellers. With the gift is a letter informing them that the Shire School has had difficulties, with the lower grades having closed since the Pandemic and they're now trying to determine the future direction of the school. Nora contacts Bea via email, leading to the girls having their first group chat in almost two years. Bea discovers the school's urgent need for ambassadors and fundraising. Motivated to help save their school, the trio reunite and develop a plan to hold a huge gathering of all the former students and alumni.

I recall making Fortune Tellers in school, although I think we referred to them as Cootie Catchers. If you constructed it properly, hidden inside you could write questions, answers or responses like yes, no, maybe and try again. Our own version of a magic eight ball. It was fun to reminisce about them while reading the book.

Fortune Tellers delves into the themes of food insecurity and the effects of a family member's epilepsy on the whole family. The story alternates among Nora, Bea and Millie, with an occasional flashback to the third and fourth grade. Each girl is nervous about starting seventh grade and how everything seems to be changing. They experience worries over popularity, boys, the status of their current friendships and unhappiness since drifting apart over a year ago. The fortune tellers serve as a bit of magic reminding them of their unresolved argument and wish to reconcile. There's valuable messaging about expressing feelings resolving conflicts, or simply forgiving each other. Which is never too late to start.

**A huge thank you to Spark Point Studio for the E-ARC via NetGalley**

There’s nothing horrible about Fortune Tellers, but there’s nothing that great about it either. It’s sort of a forgettable middle-grade novel about friendship that tweens will probably enjoy but not devour.

The book is told through alternating viewpoints. The girls to different locations and make new “friends” that they each don’t like for differing reasons and struggle to fit in to their new communities. They each face separate “trials,” but honestly feel interchangeable.

Author Lisa Greenwald’s writing is comfortable enough, though not very dynamic.

Overall, Fortune Tellers is an OK read that I suggest checking out from the library prior to purchase.

Millie, Nora, and Bea were inseparable best friends until their worlds fell apart, both separately and collectively. An epic fight with many hurt feelings begin the girls' separation, and then they are forced to move away from each other. A year later, none of them are doing well, each is lonely in her own way and none of them have ever stopped thinking of the other two. The paper fortune tellers that the girls made suddenly start appearing, even though all three girls are certain they destroyed and disposed of every last one of them, leading the girls back to each other.

Very sweet realistic fiction story of fights and forgiveness. It will find an audience with tween and young teen girls who are navigating friendships and family issues. This book is more middle school learning, as there are some "boob" references and minor cussing ("p!ssed off"), but otherwise I don't see the other content being inappropriate for upper elementary readers as well.

I wanted to like this more than I actually did. Bea, Nora, and Millie were best friends. They did everything together including getting absolutely obsessed with making fortune tellers in the 3rd grade. Their friendship gets interrupted by a falling out over popularity and a feeling of growing up which got extended by Covid. During that time, the three all moved away from New York City and had to start over. But the "magical" fortune tellers that they had created in 3rd grade started to come back to them and somehow manages to bring the group back together.

I think Greenwald was trying to do too much in this story. Bea moved to Brooklyn so that her mom could take care of Bea's aunt who had epilepsy and was dealing with progressively worse seizures. Nora moved to Westchester and had to deal with the popular girls there who were obsessed with dating and appearances. Millie moved to a camp ground type place and then meets a boy whose family is dealing with financial issues and is going through food insecurity.

The story felt forced at times. By the end I realized that it was about being honest with your friends and with yourself. That in the same way that you can never find love if you don't love yourself, you "can never really be that close someone until you open up to them."

Bea, Millie, and Nora have been best friends their whole lives. They have a falling out after Nora gets invited to popular girl Quinn's birthday party, snubbing Millie, and later declares their favorite past time, making fortune tellers, to be babyish. Then, their school closes for Covid-19 and the girls all move away. Bea moves to a different neighborhood within NYC and makes friends with a girl named Sam, whom she actively dislikes. Nora moves to the suburbs and becomes friends with two girls, but she also dislikes them. Millie moves to a lake community and meets a boy who she may or may not like-like. They each struggle with their new lives and grapple with the loss of their communities. Over the course of the book, they mysteriously find their old fortune tellers that will give them clues on how to save their school.

Honestly, I didn't like this. First of all, the fortune teller thing was sold as the main premise of this book. Supposedly, the fortune tellers are actually telling the future, but they're all just generic messages. I also felt like the girls were all interchangeable. They all moved and hated their new lives, and two of them had new friends that they didn't like. They didn't have very well developed personalities beyond being upset with their current situations, not liking their new peers, and being generic middle school girls. I wanted more from the author. There was no point to having multiple perspectives when their voices were effectively the same.

Speaking of perspective and voice, I did not enjoy how colloquial the narrative was. I expect slang in the dialog, but the author used the word "comfy" multiple times, and not in any instance where a character was speaking.

My last note, and a sort-of spoiler-- the character Sam was just so underwritten. She had SERIOUS issues. Walking in to someone's house unannounced and uninvited, yelling at Bea in front of Bea's family about how she doesn't think Bea likes her, telling Bea she would "force" her brother to kiss her? I mean... what? And the resolution was Bea saying oh well, I guess she's like that and I'll have to be her friend anyway? I feel like realistically, Bea should have probably told her mom or like any competent adult about this.

I can't seem to get past 3 stars on Greenwald's books. I always feel like the writing is bland. Characters and plot don't go deep enough. For example, in this story with three alternating perspectives, I felt like there was really just one character with three different names. And even though each character had a different storyline, none of them were memorable. Because. Not enough details. I felt like I was reading in a cloud. Every time I went back to read, I had to really think to get myself back into the story.

In this one, we have Bea, Nora, and Millie, three best friends who attended a private school in Manhattan, until Covid hit, closing the school and sending each girl elsewhere. Through a flashback technique, which was confusing, we learn that these best friends had a falling out in fifth grade. At one time they were obsessed with making paper fortune tellers, but by fifth grade Nora was over it, thinking it babyish, Millie was still into it, and Bea was caught somewhere in the middle. A fight ensued over a party Millie was not invited to, which put an end to the friendship. Typical tween drama.

Now they are living separate lives, in separate schools, not really adjusting. Millie's dad is managing a lakeside community. Bea's mom is trying to take care of her epileptic aunt while Bea deals with a very annoying friend. Nora has it the best. She's found the "in" crowd, but she's still not happy. Then the weird thing happens. All three girls start finding old fortune tellers they thought they'd thrown out, but the fortunes don't sound anything like what a third grader would have written. Even weirder, the fortune seems to be in alignment with exactly what they need to hear.

Because of the fortune tellers, they end up reconnecting through social media, admitting they REALLY miss each other, and organizing an event to save their old school. It's all so neat and tidy, and yet so unrealistic. And I just couldn't get a good mental visual of their new lives. I seriously needed better description. It was like dry cookie dough, crumbly, without enough liquid holding it together.

I think the young girls at my school will love to read this story. Third grade is not a common age you see written and they’ll eat it up!

This had a really fun concept to it. It had everything I was looking for in a middle grade novel and I enjoyed getting to know these the 3 characters as the story progressed. I love the psychic elements to it and thought it was a great blend Of the realism and the mysticism. It had everything I was looking for based on the description and I had a great time reading this. Lisa Greenwald has a great writing style and has a great way of writing characters that you care about.

Fun idea, but I had a hard time keeping track of the three characters and the time periods since the setting jumps around so much. It might be easier to get a sense of the timeline with a paper copy of the book, though.

Bea, Millie, and Nora became best friends in 3rd grade while attending The Shire, a private school in Manhattan. They loved to make paper fortune tellers, even selling them as a school fundraiser. In 5th grade, they got into a fight about attending another student's birthday party. Covid hit, the school closed, and the three girls' families moved out of the city. Fastforward to the summer before 7th grade and the three girls find a paper fortune teller despite having ripped them apart due to their fight. Will this be what it takes to reconnect?

I found this book to realistically examine how students felt when schools closed in 2020 due to Covid. Each girl is trying to cope with making new friends and rebuilding their lives after leaving a school they loved. The "mystical" nature of the fortune tellers maybe a little out of the realm of believability, but I enjoyed the themes of friendship, the importance of communication, and forgiveness.

Wonderful story of friendship, lost and found! Greenwald’s book opens with a trio of 3rd grade girls, Bea, Millie and Nora, forever friends who set out to make and sell paper fortune-tellers to their classmates to fund a grade wide party. The next bits tell the sad tale of a huge fight in the fifth grade that breaks their bond plus the pandemic, transitions to new communities and family reconfigurations, all revealed from the three different perspectives, then brings us to the summer before 7th grade. Mysterious reappearances of fortune tellers that seem to be done by their 3rd grade selves but also NOT being done by the young and slightly goofy girls leads to reconciliation and a reunion of far more than just the girls’ friendship. Wonderful character development as well as lessons in conflict resolution and adjustments to new life scenarios. Target audience is likely grades 4-6 and its length of 240 pages may make it more appealing/accessible to a wide spectrum of readers. Text is free of profanity, sexual content and violence. Representation: a variety of family configurations such as single parent, step families; a family experiencing food insecurity; one family member with epilepsy that affects the dynamics of the group. Recommended for those with readership in the realistic fiction genre. Note: the touch of magic in the fortune tellers is never explained but left to the musings of the reader.

This book was great! I love the author, and she did not disappoint. It was such an interesting story, and it all came together nicely in the end. I loved the themes of forgiveness and discovering who you are!

Lisa Greenwald always does such a great job of representing friendship between her characters.
I loved Bea, Nora, and Millie, and their differences, but that they still were such great friends.
This story is a great look at how the pandemic hurt certain areas and schools and families.
It shows how people rebuilt their lives but still wanted to keep in touch with old friends.
I liked that Mille, Bea, and Nora still really thought of the others and how we get to see pieces of their lives now, but how much they still want to be apart of each other's lives.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC

What a fun read! Nora, Bea, and Millie were best friends, making fortune tellers with magic? markers. The girls have all moved away after the pandemic, and just before this something happened and Nora blames herself. When the girls start finding fortune tellers in weird places with special messages they wonder if the fortunes have appeared for a reason.There's a meeting to discuss their old school and the girls decide to meet up. Can they mend their friendship? What happens when they find their old magic? markers?