yours truly, Lucy B. Parker - girl vs. superstar

Ahhhh, chicklit. Every now and again it's just what the doctor ordered, and yours truly, Lucy B. Parker - girl vs. superstar is pretty much all you could ask for!

It's the beginning of sixth grade, and Lucy is in a rut. She has just been friend-dumped by her BFFs Rachel and Missy, she barely survived the "hat incident", super annoying Marissa has decided to befriend Lucy now that Rachel and Missy are gone, and now Lucy's mother decides that now is the right time to tell her that she has been dating! And where does Lucy's mom decide to drop this bombshell? Only at Barbara's Bra World, which is pretty much Lucy's version of, well...you know.

So, who could this mystery man be? Is it the barista from the coffee place? One of Lucy's teachers? No. It's Alan Moses, the father of teen sensation Laurel Moses (who happens to be responsible for the hat incident). Laurel's in town shooting, and Lucy's mom has be tutoring her, and before she knew it, she was dating Alan.

Lucy cannot imagine anything worse. Not only is Laurel tall and beautiful, but all of the kids in Lucy's school are obsessed with her. Lucy sees a future of being seen as second best.

But, things are not always as they seem, and sometime perfection on the outside belies an imperfect inside.

Robin Palmer has written a delicious piece of chicklit that has a heart. Yes, there are mean girls (trust me...mean girls exist in real life too), but there is lots of charm as well. Lucy is a quirky girl (complete with a fascination with all things menstrual)and her parents are interesting and present. Sixth grade life is represented well complete with the emotional roller coaster climbing to fun loving and plummeting back down to despair in a real time tween fashion. This is the first in a series, and I am looking forward to watching Lucy grow!

A Long Way From Chicago

Call me old fashioned, but this is the kind of story telling that I love. Filled with larger than life characters and slices of Americana, Richard Peck’s stories of Grandma Dowdel are ripe for reading aloud and reading again!

Joey and Mary Alice were shipped off from Chicago to their Grandmother’s house every August starting when Joey was 9 years old. As Joey said, “Being Chicago people, Mother and Dad didn’t have a car. And Grandma wasn’t on the telephone.” (p. 4) so Joey and Mary Alice would be put on the train and sent on to Grandma’s place.

Grandma Dowdel is a big woman who is incredibly self-sufficient. It’s 1929 when the stories start, and Joey and Mary Alice are mad that their folks wouldn’t let them parade past Al Capone’s bullet ridden corpse in Chicago. Little did they know that they’d be sitting in a room with a corpse when they hit Grandma Dowdel’s place. Turns out that Shotgun Cheatham died, and because of his name, some of the bigger newspapers took a liking to his obituary and wanted to find out just exactly who this fellow was. Grandma is the type of woman who likes to keep to herself, but when she hears that folks have been making up all kinds of stories about Shotgun, she lets Joey and Mary Alice in on the kind of man that Shotgun really was.

Then the reporter shows up at her door, and Joey and Mary Alice get a taste of the adventures in store living with Grandma. No sooner does she discount the story that folks in town have told the reporter, but she is spinning a yarn so deep that the kids simply can’t believe it. And the kicker is that they are now sitting in Grandma’s front room, with Shotgun’s corpse laid out for the town and the reporter to see.

This first story gets readers ready and on the edge of their seats for the rest. From make-shift wakes, to out pranking the Halloween pranksters, to beating the law at every turn, Grandma Dowdel will have readers chuckling and gasping out loud. Old fashioned everyday gardening, canning, hunting, community events, and life without the distraction of media pepper the text along with the realities of the Depression era. Wonderfully written, these stories beg to be read aloud. I can’t wait to read the next installment about the family that moves on in next to Grandma!