LEARNING TO SWIM

Teenager Steffi Rogers can’t swim. So when Steffi’s crush, Keith McKnight, offers her swimming lessons, she accepts, even though she knows that Keith has a girlfriend and that her mother, Barbie, who is terrified of the water, will forbid the lessons. Fortunately for Steffi, her lessons coincide with Barbie falling back into “love lunacy,” which consumes her attention. Love lunacy is Steffi’s term for the eight distinct stages of Barbie’s relationships with married men, which always end in disaster and an address change for the two women. Going behind Barbie’s back isn’t Steffi’s style, but she figures Keith is worth it, until she notices symptoms of love lunacy in herself. Despite punchy dialogue, Steffi’s character falls flat, except for the interactions with her best friend Alice, a senior citizen with spunk. Readers hungry for a more satisfying mother/daughter text should check out Brad Barkley and Heather Hepler’s Scrambled Eggs at Midnight (2006). Superficial and predictable. (Fiction. YA)