Pat Murphy's The Wild Girls is nostalgic and discusses what it's like to feel different while growing up, in the great '50s tradition of expressing this difference by wanting to be a writer. I'm getting old if so many people are writing books set in the '70s now! I loved it, but my daughter, who will read anything, just couldn't get into it, and I can't think of a single student I would give this to.
John Smelcer's The Trap was a wilderness survival story that lacked action, which is what most students want from this sort of fiction.
Loved Elizabeth Levy's Tackling Dad, about a girl who really wants to play football but whose football playing dad doesn't want her to. The problem-- I have three or four books about football playing girls and one football playing girl every five years. Can't get others to read them. Levy did a great job with this one-- love the picture of her in the pads!
Laura Resau's What the Moon Saw was an interesting account of a girl's visit with her grandparents in a very remote area of Mexico, but also had a lot of magic and fantasy elements that were sort of odd. Intriguing, but again, can't think of readers.
Kirkpatrick Hill's Do Not Pass Go, about a boy whose father is incarcerated on a minor drug charge, was also well done, and I am thinking about buying this after hearing a student talking about a relative who was in jail. I'm still not sure.
Francine Prose's Bullyville sounded great in the reviews but started off annoyingly (all of the slang names for the places) and never reeled me in. I had to get it through interlibrary loan, so it must not have intrigued others, either.
Not buying books is hard. So is weeding books that haven't circulated well. Sigh.
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