Bloom

A girl sets out to have her first kiss at Oktoberfest in this young adult novel by the Pennyeach Collective.

Twelve-year-old Milly is feeling left behind. She isn’t as physically developed as she would like to be (“I’m almost thirteen and still flat as stale soda,” she laments), and, unlike all of her friends, she’s still never kissed a boy. Her status might change, however, now that she’s discovered a new potential crush—a boy her age wearing an oversized floppy hat who she spots through binoculars while he wanders the riverfront of her Midwestern town. The town is about to begin its yearly Oktoberfest celebration; when Milly eventually learns that the floppy-hatted boy’s name is Frank, she dubs him the Frankfurter. After sighting Frankfurter three separate times on Friday, Milly makes it her mission to meet and kiss the boy on Saturday, the “fest-iest day” of the festival. It’s a tourist explosion of German American kitsch—Dachshund Races, BBQ grill-meisters, knobby-kneed dancers in lederhosen—and Milly must navigate it all if she wants to make good on her resolution. Along the way, she will have to deal with her single, overeducated mom, who uses the fact that she has no teeth to repel unwanted male attention and will soon lose her job when the town’s olive oil store closes; her long-absent dad, who has arrived back up in town as a balloon-twisting clown; and a Glee Club performance in which Milly must dress as a German boy. Will Milly make it through the day, get her kiss, and change everything? The novel brings the setting to carnivalesque life through Milly’s wonderfully bratty, ingenuous, anxious point of view. She begs one of her classmates for kissing advice: “Like how you knew when to open your mouth, and what your tongue was supposed to be doing the whole time, and if the whole deal wasn’t actually kinda gross.” The characters, location, and narrative voice are all so specific and inviting that the pages fly by, bearing the reader through the boundless chaos of late tweendom.

An imaginative, heartwarming tale of love and community.