Going Going by Naomi Shihab NyeHarperCollins, 2005

Florrie, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of this book, is pleasingly quirky. She only wears gray, and she loves history: not the history of wars and laws, but social history, daily history: the sense of the past of a place. She collects old postcards and wanders San Antonio, where she lives, noticing architectural details, riding hotel elevators, thinking of the old restaurants and shops her grandfather used to tell her about, most of which are now closed. And so she decides to boycott national chains, patronizing only local businesses for sixteen weeks. She convinces family and friends to join in, and the story of their boycott is a pleasing one — descriptions of food from local restaurants as an example of realness, of what we lose when megastores are the only places to go.