THE YEAR THE SWALLOWS CAME EARLY

Eleven-year-old Eleanor “Groovy” Robinson is a girl with a dream. Fascinated by food and blessed with a culinary knack, Groovy plans to use the money left her by her great-grandmother to go to cooking school, until she discovers that her father has gambled this money—her money—away. And what’s worse, her own mother has had him arrested for it. Groovy is by turns hurt, angry and lonely, but underneath all that, she is confused. Her friend Frankie faces a similar situation: His mother vanished, leaving him in the care of his stepbrother, only to return years later hoping for a blissful reunion. In this daring, emotionally complex story, both Groovy and Frankie try to figure out how to accept people, especially parents, for who they are without abandoning their own needs and their own developing notions of right and wrong. As in real life, not everything is resolved in the end, and many questions remain, but things have achieved a fragile balance, rather like the ingredients in a delicate sauce. (Fiction. 10-14)