COSMOS COYOTE AND WILLIAM THE NICE

An at-risk teenager finds love while skating the ragged edge of disaster, in this offbeat romance from the author of Being Youngest (1997). Desperate to stay out of juvie, Cosmos opts for an alternative sentence, leaving his Seattle-area home, band, and girlfriend for a year of high school at the Dutch Corners Christian Academy, near the strait-laced Iowa farm community in which his father had been raised. Knowing full well that he’d better keep his nose shiny clean, Cosmos tries to hide his wilder impulses behind a bland persona (see title)—not easy, especially when he comes under suspicion for a series of thefts at school just as he and born-again class leader Cherlyn are raising hackles by publicly falling madly in love. Readers will find plenty to like in this star-crossed pair, who alternate lens-fogging bouts of making out with honest, forthright discussions of their differences that are clearly fueled by genuine mutual respect. Cherlyn is not a caricature or a mouthpiece for the author, but a complex character with a simple faith, fully able to distinguish between God’s expectations and those of her community, sensible but not afraid of pushing boundaries. Heynen keeps the tone light with hilariously over-the-top imagery—Cosmos perceives the feedlot odors floating through his bedroom window one summer night as “a three-layered stench cake”—provides a supporting cast of surprisingly (at least to Cosmos) tolerant adults, throws his protagonist into one potential catastrophe after another, and wraps it all up on a high note. A sweet, funny, passionate triumph. (Fiction. YA)