BAD GIRL BLUES

“Things change” is the moral of Warner’s (How to Be a Real Person in Just One Day, 2000, etc.) deft, surprisingly gripping novel about an ordinary, small-town girl. All her life, 12-year-old Quinney Todd has been best friends with Marguerite Harper and Brynn Mathers. But now Marguerite, who is bored with the tiny town of Lake Geneva, is growing apart from her old friends. Then, shortly after their first year of middle school starts, itself a big change, Marguerite cuts class and goes for a ride with four beer-drinking high-school boys. The kids get into a minor car accident, but it has major repercussions for Marguerite’s reputation. This predictably leads to a moral dilemma for Quinney: should she defend her friend or reject her along with everyone else. The decision is not made any easier for her by Marguerite’s frankly unapologetic, tough-girl stance. This situation, coupled with Quinney’s new volunteer job at an animal shelter, the sudden dissension between her five-year-old twin brothers, and her fresh feelings for handsome eighth-grader Cree Scovall, all combine to keep Quinney scrambling to maintain emotional balance. Wisdom is supplied by the owner of the animal shelter, a prickly woman who “never met a person yet who could measure up to your average house pet” and was herself once the object of small-town gossip and rejection. Girls should root for Quinney, a basically good-hearted every-girl type, and identify with the garden-variety situations she has to cope with as she struggles to meet the challenges of growing up. (Fiction. 10-14)