During a roller-coaster of a spring, Cory (17) falls in love with a Native American, her mother dies while awaiting a heart transplant, and her Wisconsin town is racked by racial feelings over Native American fishing rights. Outgoing and popular, Cory is unprepared for the hatred directed at her when she begins dating Mac. Rob, her older married brother, opposes the Crees' special fishing rights; when a violent eruption occurs, Cory aligns herself against him, creating a rift that seems unbridgeable; but eventually the two begin to be reconciled, and Cory adopts her mother's credo: you can change the world, one heart at a time. This earnest novel, with its realistic, if sometimes didactic, look at bigotry, is a mixed effort, alternating vivid writing with more ordinary prose. Cory and Mac's approach to sex is cautious: when she takes him to the motel where she works to bandage his wounds after the riot, they moralize about why they're not doing it; but the book is also spiced with a funny retaliatory prank with the condoms a racist has stuffed into Cory's school locker. Relationships, especially Cory's with her nice stepfather and her troubled brother, are believably drawn. A likable, fast-paced story with a lot going on. (Fiction. 12+)
