CALL ME DANICA

Thirteen-year-old Danica's dreams of Vancouver, fed by postcards from an Aunt and Uncle, yield to a harsher reality when her father dies, a new highway diverts tour buses from the family's Croatian village inn, and Mama at last agrees that the family should emigrate. What they find on arrival are a mean little basement apartment (""in this city of towers""), an exhausting, underpaid kitchen job for Mama, and chic people who make Danica feel shabby. But the goal of a family restaurant is realized sooner than you'd expect; Danica makes nice adult friends as well as earning clothes money from a dog-walking business, and--after a short, difficult time with a more worldly, older girl who wants the two of them to sing in nightclubs--she sorts out her Croatian and Canadian identities and settles down to the studies that will make her a doctor some day. It's a bit solemn and occasionally drab, but Danica does invite champions.