Ashley thinks of herself as a normal kid: best friend next door, hot, but unreliable dropout boyfriend, parents a bit spacey, and a household barely hanging in there. She’s not into the prom the way her best friend Natalia is, so when it nearly gets cancelled because a teacher has absconded with all the money, Ashley is not prepared for Nat’s approach. Nat figures they can still have a prom, if they beg for stuff and get teachers to help and bribe the custodial staff and so on. Rather against her will, Ashley gets sucked into the lists in Nat’s pink notebook. It delights her very pregnant mom; it makes dealing with all those detentions and uncompleted assignments even more of a chore; it focuses Nat’s slightly addled Russian grandmother on dressmaking; and calls Ashley’s hilarious aunts to the fore. Modern teen life just outside Philadelphia is vividly drawn in Ashley’s first-person tale, and it’s both screamingly funny and surprisingly tender. It’s also full of sly throwaway references: oaths taken on a copy of Lord of the Rings instead of a Bible, Ash’s dad singing Aerosmith, accounts that read, “he was all . . . I was all . . . then he was all.” Expect teen readers to be quoting aloud to each other, and giggling. (Fiction. YA)
