DEBBIE NUMBER THREE

An out-of-town teen meets a local girl with a familiar name in Hawthorne’s debut YA novel.

The year is 1966, and 15-year-old Eddie Dodson is the best football player in his neighborhood of Marshall, Texas. He loves the Beatles, memorizes scenes from movies in his spare time, and worries about what people think of his loudmouthed, liquor-swilling father. Eddie has two “Debbies” in his life: his neighbor, Debby Bishop, on whom he has a huge crush, and his best friend, Debra Lynn Mayfield, who has a crush on him. Eddie’s parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and while they figure things out, Eddie is sent to spend the summer on his aunt and uncle’s dairy farm, four hours away in Kassel, Texas. There, he meets a new Debbie—a straight-talking, Bob Dylan–loving girl named Debbie Gehring, who approaches Eddie at the community pool. She invites him out to a baseball game, and the two of them end up breaking into Eddie’s dead grandmother’s abandoned house and talking all night long about their dreams, fears, and insecurities. Eddie quickly realizes that Debbie Number Three might be the one for him. But what does that mean for the other Debbies? And what happens when the summer ends and he has to go back home? Hawthorne’s prose, as narrated by Eddie, captures the angst and attitude of adolescence: “These might have been the best twelve consecutive hours of my life, up to that point….Happiness hurls me out of bed in the morning and swept me through the day in the direction of an old rug in an old house on a dark street facing a cemetery….” The book is longer than it needs to be, and near the end Hawthorne cribs inelegantly from The Outsiders, but there is plenty here for contemporary teens to enjoy. The dynamics between Eddie and the Debbies are evergreen, as are the anxieties of youth.

A tender, often funny novel about young love.