AN OTHERWISE PERFECT PLAN

In Schafer’s YA novel, a plucky teenage girl tries to locate the father she’s never met.

All Gwen Pendergrass knows about her father is that her mother, Karen, met him in Las Vegas. The only pictures Gwen has of him are on a strip the couple took in a casino photo booth. For the 16 years since then, it’s been just Gwen and her mom, living in a one-bedroom apartment on Karen’s waitressing earnings. Karen wanted to be a writer, but mothering duties took precedence. Trying to help her mom realize her dream, Gwen secretly applies, on Karen’s behalf, to a writing program at Yale, but even with the special scholarship she’s offered, there’s not enough money for Karen to go back to school. Then Karen shares new information with Gwen: Her father had just sold one of his novels in a major movie deal, and he never even knew Karen was pregnant. With this small piece of information, Gwen resolves to figure out who her father is and try to convince him to assist in paying for Karen’s schooling. For help, she enlists her best friend, Peter, the bread-baking, refrigerator-shaped son of two hippies. It’s the perfect plan…as long as nothing goes wrong. Unfortunately for Gwen, pretty much everything goes wrong almost immediately. Gwen narrates the story in first person, and her chatty, incisive voice quickly enthralls the reader. Here she discusses her hometown: “An alka-seltzer of a former town, whose old buildings often look like they’ve been sitting there dissolving away over the years ever since the proud city of Roxbury was eaten by Boston and dissolved into the melting pot of greater Bostburbia….” The book ostensibly takes place during the Obama administration, though aspects of it feel even older (Gwen routinely refers to the internet as “the Web”), which may confuse some younger readers. Even so, there’s a timeless, almost cinematic quality to the characters and story structure that many readers will happily sink right into.

A charming, inventive YA novel about discovering who you really are.