“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). <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}