good teen reading

Letting Go of Bobby James, Or, How I Found My Self of Steam by Sally Jo Walker by Valerie Hobbs Sally Jo “Jody” Walker is 16 years old, and the first member of her family to graduate from eighth grade. She’s from Texas, but in Florida on her honeymoon, when her new husband ups and slaps her. Shaken, she hides in the gas station restroom. He leaves without her and she decides she’s not going to go back to Texas and a history of abused wives. While this book really has the potential to be just another depressing teen issues book, and the issues are indeed there, and serious, the reader ends up taking a delightful journey with a wonderfully spunky heroine, who does end up finding her “self of steam”.

Rococo

Rococo by Adriana Trigiani B – short for Bartolomeo di Crespi – is a decorator who puts his heart into his work. Although he could have stayed in New York after design school, he chose to return to his small Jersey hometown in an effort to make it beautiful. Life is full of its ordinary concerns – the big fortieth birthday bash that his sister refuses to cancel, the engagement his mother and her best friend made when he and Capri were babies that they've never gotten around to breaking off. Then he hears that his church is due a renovation. It's been his lifelong dream to decorate Our Lady of Fatima, but will he get the job? And is he really up to the challenge of a design to suit a whole parish, meant to last 100 years? As always, Trigiani's work is chock full of colorful characters (mostly Italian), a feel-good plot that still manages to avoid too much sugar, and a trip to Italy. In this particular book, there's also a fair amount of gold bullion fringe and Italian-American recipes. Stephen Hoye narrates in the perfect Jersey tones to bring out both the humor and the genuine emotion of the whole book.