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Atheneum
April 2011
On Sale: March 22, 2011
224 pages
ISBN: 1416995854
EAN: 9781416995852
Hardcover
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Young Adult
Janie Gorman wants to be normal. The problem with that:
she’s not. She’s smart and creative and a little bit funky.
She’s also an unwilling player in her parents’ modern-hippy,
let’s-live-on-a-goat-farm experiment (regretfully,
instigated by a younger, much more enthusiastic Janie).
This, to put it simply, is not helping Janie reach that
“normal target.” She has to milk goats every day…and endure
her mother’s pseudo celebrity in the homemade-life, crunchy
mom blogosphere. Goodbye the days of frozen lasagna and
suburban living, hello crazy long bus ride to high school
and total isolation--and hovering embarrassments of all
kinds. The fresh baked bread is good…the threat of homemade
jeans, not so much. It would be nice to go back to that old suburban life…or
some grown up, high school version of it, complete with
nice, normal boyfriends who wear crew neck sweaters and like
social studies. So, what’s wrong with normal? Well, kind of
everything. She knows that, of course, why else would she
learn bass and join Jam Band, how else would she know to
idolize infamous wild-child and high school senior Emma (her
best friend Sarah’s older sister), why else would she get
arrested while doing a school project on a local freedom
school (jail was not part of the assignment). And, why else
would she kind of be falling in "like" with a boy named
Monster—yes, that is his real name. Janie was going for
normal, but she missed her mark by about ten miles…and we
mean that as a compliment. Frances O’Roark Dowell’s fierce humor and keen eye make her
YA debut literary and wise. In the spirit of John Green and
E. Lockhart, Dowell’s relatable, quirky characters and
clever, fluid writing prove that growing up gets
complicated…and normal is WAY overrated.
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