PARKED

Rebecca Stead meets The Westing Game in this scrappy, poignant, uplifting debut about family, friendship, and accepting help enough to help yourself. Debut novelist Danielle Svetcov nails heartbreak and hope, and pulls it off with a kind of kid-speed levity and warmth that make the funny parts of this story cathartic and the difficult parts all the more affecting.

Twelve-year-old Jeanne Ann has doubts when her mom spends their savings on an old orange van and bundles them off to San Francisco to chase Mom's dream of working as a chef. There, they camp on the street while her mother looks for a job she never gets. Before long, Jeanne Ann realizes that this van is the closest thing she has to a home.

Across the road, twelve-year-old Cal watches the homeless community parked just beyond his big house. Cal's mom is busy with the upscale restaurant she owns, but they've always been close--until Cal does something his mom just doesn't understand.

Then Cal and Jeanne Ann meet. Cal is too tall and too weird and too rich and wears all his emotions on the outside of his skin, and he just wants to help. Jeanne Ann is smart, she is funny, she is stubborn--hers is a royal-looking chin, in Cal's opinion--and she does not want his help. But a quirky, meaningful friendship develops. And as it does, the pair is buoyed by a remarkable cast of nuanced, oddball characters who let them down and lift them up.

This is for fans of Rebecca Stead, Tae Keller, Barbara O'Connor, Joan Bauer, and Gary D. Schmidt--and for middle schoolers who are still mostly interested in friendship and family but beginning to be curious about romance in the most innocent way.

Danielle Svetcov was a journalist writing for the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, and the Chicago Tribune Magazine before joining the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency in 2002. Sometime later, she worked up the courage to write a novel of her own, which turned into her debut, Parked.