Ordinary Girls

Gr 8 Up—Patience Mortimer Blatchley—better known as Plum—hates her older sister Ginny almost as much as she loves her. Caught up in college admissions panic, Ginny is increasingly prone to dramatic meltdowns. Plum considers herself the practical one—the one who, when confronted with her family's impending financial ruin and the potential loss of their sprawling, dilapidated home, turns to Victorian literature for inspiration. Discarding possibilities such as being shipped off to distant relatives or marrying up, she muses, "If it were not the 21st century, and I were not only 15, I would become a governess." A string of awkward coincidences follows, and Plum finds herself accidentally hired as an English tutor for Tate Kurokawa, a popular, athletic boy who is as different from Plum as she feels it is possible for a person to be. As Plum and Tate grow closer, Plum's mother organizes chaotic fundraising events in their home and Ginny grows increasingly frantic about her financial aid prospects. Plum discounts Ginny's anxieties as mere drama until a frightening incident reminds her how central sisterhood, with all of its challenges, is to her identity. Thornburgh's second novel offers a charming riff on Sense and Sensibility, with fully realized characters and a setting—the Blatchley house—so well loved that it feels like a character in its own right. Readers will happily lose themselves in the warmly realistic family dynamics, the sisters' laugh-out-loud literary banter, and the sweet, low-key romance. This book's greatest strength, however, is its remarkably nuanced look at the intimate, and at times claustrophobic, bonds of sisterhood.