Publisher Description

Fourteen-year-old Toni has always felt lucky--but her luck begins to change the summer her father suffers a near-fatal heart attack, her best friend moves away, and Toni is sent to New York City stay with her older sister, Martine, who reveals a devastating secret about their family.

Author Biography

NORMA FOX MAZER is an award-winning novelist and a faculty member for the Vermont College MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Christopher Award, an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, a National Book Award nomination, and other honors. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

Review

"Mazer offers a thorough, sensitive exploration of parent/teen relationships as she reveals how a sheltered girl discovers that the people she loves are neither perfect nor infallible."--Publishers Weekly
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Review Quote

"Mazer offersa thorough, sensitive exploration of parent/teen relationships as she reveals how a sheltered girl discovers that the people she loves are neither perfect nor infallible."--Publishers Weekly

Excerpt from Book

CHAPTER 1 TONI HAD ALWAYS thought of herself as lucky. Toni Luck, she called it. She was lucky in her parents, lucky to have Julie. Those were the big things. But what about the little things, like the way Paws had come to her, just showed up at their house one day and stayed? Pure luck. Or how about the way she was always finding money in the street? Usually it was only a quarter or a dime, but once she had found a ten-dollar bill, and another time a silver dollar. Julie said Toni was probably the only kid in the world who could take a casual walk anywhere and pick up her allowance on the way. Toni''s lucky feeling about herself was why she wasn''t even that surprised when a reporter from the Ridgewood Record wanted to write a story about her and Julie. Julie was the one who got excited. "This could be important. What if a Hollywood producer sees my picture--" "Julie, I really don''t think they read the Record in Hollywood," Toni said. "But what if one did and saw me and thought, ''By Jove, that girl is photogenic and has talent!''" "Don''t think they say ''by Jove,'' either, Jul." "Shut up, Toni." "Whatever you say, Julie." The Ridgewood Record came out once a week with news and articles about people in their town. Small-town paper, only about eight pages and filled with ads, the features squeezed in between. How the paper happened to run the article about her and Julie was, Toni thought, like a Rube Goldberg contraption. The kind of thing where you press a button and a window flies open, which hits someone in the head, who falls down and knocks over a chair, which breaks a dish, which wakes the baby, who bites the dog. The button in this case was Mrs. Abish, a widow who lived across the street at 92 Oak. One Sunday morning she got a yen for pancakes and noticed she didn''t have any maple syrup. She got on her three-speed bike and rode over to Paulsons'' Market, a mom-and-pop store on Poplar Avenue that was open from seven in the morning to midnight, seven days a week. Mr. Paulson happened to be in bed with a cold that day, so Mrs. Paulson was unusually busy, which was why she didn''t know someone had broken a bottle of syrup right at the end of aisle three. Which was why Mrs. Abish, coming around the corner, walked right into the sticky mess, slipped, and went flat on her back. "It must have been a glorious sight, me flailin'' around on the floor like a fat fish," she said to anyone who would listen. Really she wasn''t fat so much as large, or what Toni''s mother kindly called well padded. "Look at me. I used to be a slip of a girl. I''m this way from the grand food in this country," Mrs. Abish would say. She had been born in Ireland and rolled her r''s wonderfully. She came home from the hospital with her leg in a cast. It was the beginning of spring vacation for Julie and Toni, and they didn''t have that much to do, so they started going across the street to see if they could help Mrs. Abish, run to the store for her, or whatever. (Actually it had been Toni''s mother''s idea to begin with.) Mrs. Abish was delighted. "Is that you, loves?" she''d call when she heard their steps on the porch. Inside, she''d be sitting on the couch with her leg extended on a stool. Toni and Julie would sit down and talk to her for a while, then they''d dust or wash the dishes, whatever she wanted done. One day toward the end of va

Description for Bookstore

HarperTrophy paperback edition 1991 0-380-75720-6

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