OBJECTS IN MIRROR

In this richly nuanced, if not particularly eventful, story, a teenager gets a fresh dose of self-confidence while discovering that she doesn’t know a new friend as well as she thinks. Feuding with a stiff-necked teacher over a scheduling conflict at school, and forever regarded as guilty until proven innocent at home, Grace’s life would be beset with tension even if her father weren’t recovering from a stroke, or her wayward older sister Sophie suddenly moving back in. When her breezy, supposedly adopted locker mate asks Grace to arrange a “surprise” birthday party for her, and most particularly to invite Ted, another friend’s big brother, Grace begins to see more clearly just how manipulative Allison is, and to suspect (rightly) that she hasn’t been entirely truthful about her past. Bounded by home, school, and the local art center where she works, Grace’s world is a small one, but filled with distant, happy, fretful, wise, weary, suspicious, loving people in the throes of living. By the end, newly charged with a greater appreciation of her own abilities—and the realization that Ted’s attention is more on her than on Allison—Grace spins happily “into the crowd, pulled into an orbit somewhere between the past and possibility.” Young (Moving Mama to Town, 1997, etc.) moves her setting from the small southern towns of her previous novels to a more generalized locale, but infuses her tale with the same warmth of feeling and subtly delivered insight into character. (Fiction. 11-15)