"It's Friday afternoon, last period. Gym. Ms. Warner and I have done our Friday high five. We do it every week, because I hate school and she hates work, and we both live for Friday.

We're playing volleyball, with an exclamation point. Ms. Warner has written it on the whiteboard outside the gym doors: Volleyball!

The combination of seeing that word and breathing the smell of the first floor, which is the smell of the cafeteria after lunch, creates some kind of echo in my head, like a faraway shout.

In the morning, the cafeteria smells fried and sweet, like fish sticks and cookies. But after lunch, it's different. There's more kid sweat and garbage mixed in, I guess. Or maybe it's just that, after lunch, the cafeteria doesn't have the smell of things to come. It's the smell of what has been."

Georges (the "G" is silent) is in seventh grade, and his family has just moved from their house in Brooklyn to a nearby apartment, because his father lost his job. He misses his old house, his former best friend who now ignores him at school, and his mom, who's away every night at the hospital, where she works double shifts. But then Georges meets Safer and Candy - brother and sister who live a few floors up; they're homeschooled, Safer is a self-proclaimed spy, and he immediately introduces Georges to the high level of intrigue that exists in their apartment building. If Safer is a loner at home, then Georges is a loner at school, where he's dreading the soon-to-come Science Unit of Destiny, which may solidify his standing as the biggest outcast in the school. But as he finds a tribe of his own at school, things begin to intensify at home: Safer's spy games escalate, and reveal a secret about Safer - a secret that brings Georges's own secret bubbling to the surface.

Rebecca Stead is incredible. She creates distinctly unique and three-dimensional characters, in distinctly New York settings. You can hear the traffic on the streets while reading her books, and the little details about urban living - sticky door locks, corner grocery stores, lobby intercoms - ring true, and become integral parts of the story themselves. And her stories . . . man. Her plots have been compared to onions (peeling back layers, etc.), and while that works, this novel provides what I think is the best analogy to her plot structure. Georges is named after the French artist Georges Seurat, and the family has a print from the pointillist painter hanging above their couch. The idea of composing a canvas through small dots of color, which make a complete picture when viewed from afar, works perfectly for this novel, as well as Stead's earlier When You Reach Me. Stead leaves little dots of detail scattered throughout the text, and it's only upon finishing do they all form the complete picture of what's been going on in the life of Georges, his family and friends. This is an outstanding novel about the lie children and adults concoct, in order to entertain, deceive, or just make it to the end of another day.