A & L Do Summer

Gr 8—10 Up—Aspen and Laurel are looking forward to the summer before their senior year. This will be Laurel's first summer in Cotton Wood Creek, IA, and she is determined that she and Aspen will make their mark. The plan includes attending parties, attracting boyfriends, and pulling a good end-of-school prank to get in with the popular kids, but they end up dealing with school bullies, jobs, cranky neighbors, a new police officer, and crimes that A & L might be in the middle of. The teens are placed in some interesting situations, and real tension develops from dealing with harassment from the bullies, but character development is limited, even for the two protagonists. Aspen is likable enough, but readers are bound to get frustrated with her continued poor choices, while Laurel's portrayal as a sympathetic character comes late in the book, possibly after readers have ceased to care. The friends get into one scrape after another, including brushes with the law for a school prank, illegal fireworks, underage drinking, and stealing a chicken, but the problems seem contrived and ceaseless, and the resolution to the bully situation is convenient and clichéd. Romances for both girls develop late in the book but are cookie-cutter relationships, without any real sense of connection or emotion.—Natasha Forrester, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR