Available Formats
Words Apart
By (Author) Aimee Lucido
Illustrated by Phillippa Corcutt
Illustrated by Rachael Corcutt
HarperCollins Publishers Inc
HarperCollins
30th September 2025
United States
Children
Fiction
Childrens / Teenage fiction: Family and home stories
Childrens / Teenage general interest: Girls and women
Childrens / Teenage personal and social topics: Self-awareness and self-esteem
Childrens / Teenage personal and social topics: Families and family members
Childrens / Teenage personal and social topics: Divorce, separation, family brea
Childrens / Teenage personal and social topics: Siblings
Childrens / Teenage personal and social topics: First / new experiences and grow
Hardback
400
Aimee Lucido's hybrid middle grade novel explores the fraught relationship between sisters as they navigate their differences and their parents divorcebeautifully told in words and comic panels.
Olive collects words. Rare words, common words, fancy words, funny words. She expresses herself through definitions, poetry, and crossword puzzles that she creates.
Her sister, Mattie, could not be more opposite. Mattie struggles with words and prefers pictures instead, expressing herself through cartoons and sketches.
Despite their differences, the two girls are inseparable. Or at least they were. After their dad moves to Durham, North Carolina, where he works as a professor during the week, and Olive develops a crush on Max Tucker and begins making friends other than Mattie, the sisters' dynamic changes. With their dad gone and acting suspiciously when he's home, their mom hovering over them about grades, and their own relationship fracturing, Olive and Mattie, through crossword puzzles and sketches, definitions and doodles, come to realize that love doesn't always look how we envision and it and that sometimes letting someone go is the best way to show you love them.
Aimee Lucido is a software engineer and the author of Emmy in the Key of Code. She got her MFA in writing for children and young adults at Hamline University and lives with her husband and dog in Berkeley, California, where she likes to bake, run, and write crossword puzzles. aimeelucido.com Twitter: @AimeeLucido Instagram: @AimeeLucido