“Where does trouble come from? How do you get into it?” (9). For fourteen-year-old Gwen Needle, the trouble, and also the adventure, starts on Memorial Day, when she’s caught shoplifting at a drugstore. She also has a falling out with her mean-girl best friend, quits the synchronized swimming team she’s been on (partly because of that falling-out, partly because she’s tired of doing things because of other people’s expectations), and has to volunteer at a residence for senior citizens as punishment for the shoplifting. But she also makes a new friend, Amber, and ends up enjoying her time at the senior citizens’ residence more than she expects: she spends time with Errol, an old man who’s senile and sometimes grouchy but enjoys Gwen’s company, says he used to be in the Navy, and has a great collection of books about pirates. Reading Errol’s books, Gwen and Amber get ideas: they’ll take to the sea and be pirates themselves: they’ll be able to go anywhere, do anything, be free. Gwen says they “want to forge a social order” that’s “beyond the realm of traditional authority,” which is, of course, what teenagers want in general, right? (109).
Meanwhile, this book is also the story of Gwen’s father, Phil, a radio producer who’s pitching a show about a great American blues singer. Phil’s struggling with work, and flailing a bit in general; he’s also kind of a jerk, and I wasn’t really interested in reading his middle-aged married white guy story. But then Gwen and Amber’s story of piracy gets rather too real/dark/violent, and Phil’s perspective provides some solid comic relief.
It’s hard to figure out what to say about this book without being spoiler-y. It’s well-written, and the funny parts are often really funny, and there’s some good satire of contemporary American society, and I like Gwen and Amber’s friendship lots. But the violent bits at the center of the book felt gratuitous, and I felt that they pushed the book into unbelievability, plot-wise and character-wise. I’m still glad I read it though.
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