A sensitive story of an adolescent girl uncovering her past and discovering the possibilities for her future.
For twelve-year-old Roxanne, there are two things in life she can count on: her beloved grandmother, Mimi, and her weekend job at the flea market where she helps Mimi buy and sell fresh produce and other people’s junk to pay the household bills. This is her home and the people she knows and loves are here.
But outside this fragile weekend world, she’s lost. A so-so student with few aspirations for higher education, she feels out of place at school. Stuck in the back of the pack with the other “lardbutts,” Rox just tries to stay out of the way of the popular creeps in her class. And who is she anyway? Her teenage mother left when she was only three months old and her father’s identity is a mystery. And no one, least of all Mimi, will talk about what happened.
But then her cousin John Martin brings home a girlfriend from college who has very different ideas about the way life works. And when Roxanne discovers her mother’s teenage diary, she finds some painful but important answers to the unsolved questions of her past and the possibilities for a different future.
With gentle wit and an uncanny sensitivity, author Adrian Fogelin captures the fragility of life’s certainties in this moving novel of an adolescent girl’s struggles to find her way in the world.
