STEALING HEAVEN

Other teens spend their evenings eating home-cooked meals and trudging through homework; Danielle, 18, has always lived on the run with her professional-thief mother, memorizing floor plans of estate homes and quickly calculating the worth of silver place-settings. When they arrive in Heaven, a quaint, affluent New England beach town, the lonely girl thinks it is just one more stop on an endless road to nowhere. While Danielle is meant to be gathering information on the Donaldson mansion, she inadvertently becomes chummy with Allison Donaldson, enters into a secret romance with Greg, a cop, and imagines the freedom of friends, love and a place to call home. Although her mother’s persistent cough telegraphs the book’s ending and makes it awfully convenient for Danielle finally to take root and realize her own dreams, teens will focus on the story’s real crime—a stolen life. The fast-paced, conversational first-person narration makes for good escapist entertainment for chick-lit readers. (Fiction. YA)