LIVING ON IMPULSE

With her life spinning out of control, an unfocused teen searches for the person she wants to be and eventually finds her. Fifteen-year-old Mia lives in a college town in rural New York with her disgruntled single-parent mother and her ailing grandfather, who has high hopes for his granddaughter. But Mia eschews school, refusing to believe college is the only thing she can do with her life. Living on impulse, Mia’s arrested for shoplifting, insults her teacher, offends her friends and is forced to take a disgusting part-time job breeding flies in the entomology lab. But as her friends disown her, her grandfather fails and her mother resorts to alcohol, Mia learns an important lesson from the fly life-cycle and starts building her own cocoon to survive. Developed with realism, humor and insight in a colloquial third-person voice, Mia’s flawed character proves credible. Her transformation story brims with loss and forgiveness as she painfully discovers “change can happen really fast for people” when they start making good choices instead of bad. (Fiction. 12-16)