Twelve-year-old Jane lives year-round on the Massachusetts coast with her poetry-writing mother and 3 younger siblings. As her summer begins, she prays for a hundred adventures and gets more than she bargained for.
The author, Polly Horvath, is certainly a talented writer. She brings a whole palette of quirky characters to life, and I laughed aloud at her witty descriptions. At other times I paused to muse over pithy observations made by the protagonist like ” We affect people around us so much with our moods” (p. 27) or “No one really understands a family but the people in it and even they each understand it differently” (p.68).
Nonetheless, there were things in this book that disturbed me like the woman pastor that Jane became an unwitting companion to as she distributes Bibles and uses her hands to “move people’s energies and unblock them” (p. 37). The pastor was very strange and dabbled in “new age” kind of ideas, faith healing, fortune-telling, and channeling.
Jane’s mother had all four of her children out of wedlock, and no man had ever been a part of their family life. In fact, Jane is not sure who her father is, but as part of her summer adventure she meets several of her mother’s former boyfriends. Her mother is a free spirit that lets Jane roam around all day long without knowing where Jane is going.
In other words, the book was really weird in a lot of ways. And the Lord’s name was taken in vain several times. All of that is enough for me to say that while I appreciate the author’s abilities, I would not recommend this book.
