Book Review of The Secret to Belonging
The Children’s Book Review
The Secret to Belonging
Written by Megan E. Freeman
Ages: 12+ | 352 Pages
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers (2026) | ISBN: 978-1-6659-8840-7
What to Expect: Novel in verse, coming-of-age, family, addiction, belonging, Norway, exchange student, resilience.
A teen girl accustomed to forging her own way while her brother’s addiction absorbs her parents’ attention trades the only life she’s known for an exchange year in remote Norway—a chance to step outside the life she’s been trapped inside and, perhaps, discover the secret to belonging.
Your parents have poured every ounce of care into your brother’s drug addiction. You’ve learned to live in the margins of your own family. Your dreams have shrunk. Your voice hushed. And when the college fund your grandfather left you (your one ticket to a future of your own making) gets spent on another round of rehab, even hope feels hopeless. Then comes an unexpected lifeline: a scholarship to study abroad in a remote corner of Norway, a place where no one knows your story and you might, at last, find an opportunity to write a new one.
Megan E. Freeman writes in free verse, and boy does she write freely—with a level of honesty that lets every emotion land exactly where it needs to. One of her most powerful craft choices is the use of second person: the protagonist is addressed only as “you”, pulling readers directly into the protagonist’s skin, making her ache your ache and her breakthroughs your breakthroughs. Readers feel the pain of her familial invisibility, the tentative thrill of being chosen by a first-love, and the quiet, radical relief of discovering that the weight of someone else’s choices was never yours to shoulder. Freeman trusts the white space on the page as much as the words themselves, providing space for grief and wonder to grow in turn.
The setting of Norway is rendered so vividly that you can feel the chill in the air, and the hush of the snow-blanketed scenery, and Norwegian words weave naturally into the verse as the protagonist picks up the language—each new word a quiet measure of how far she’s come. The result is a novel that moves quickly but penetrates deeply, with chapters readers will want to curl up in and stay awhile.
More than a story about escape, The Secret to Belonging is a meditation on what it means to build a home within yourself—and to recognize that healthy relationships, the kind that let you breathe, are worth the long journey to find them. Readers who loved Alone will find Freeman at the height of her powers in this book for young adults, and teens navigating complicated families, or simply the ache of wanting to belong, will find a companion in these pages.
A luminous, necessary addition to the verse novel canon.
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About the Author
Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her New York Times bestselling novel in verse, ALONE, won the Colorado Book Award, the Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont Children’s Book Awards, the High Plains Book Award, is an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and is included on over two dozen “best of” and state reading lists.
Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and the author of the poetry chapbook Lessons on Sleeping Alone. An award-winning teacher with decades of classroom experience, Megan is nationally recognized for her work leading workshops and speaking to audiences across the country. Megan used to live in northeast Los Angeles, central Ohio, northern Norway, and on Caribbean cruise ships. Now she divides her time between northern Colorado and the Texas Gulf Coast.
For more information, visit https://www.meganefreeman.com/
