For: Gr. 9+Published: 2006
312 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Read: Over the Christmas holidays, finished yesterday on the plane home
Ashley Mitchell, a spoiled, popular high school senior gets the surprise of her life when she discoveres her mother has embezzeled money from her firm and left town, leaving Ashley completely alone, destitute, and unprepared. I very much enjoyed watching Ashley's character change and grow and rearrange itself so that she became a survivor and a much nicer person. Set in Burlingame, CA and San Francisco, Ashley sells all the contents of her house, lives in a tiny unheated camper trailer behind a gas station, and gets a job at a coffee shop in SF - all things that she would have previously sneered at/about. She lets down her snobbiness and snootiness more and more, slowly making real (vs. superficial) friends, and discovering what it really takes to survive in life.
This was a really good story, kept me entertained on long airline flights without making my eyes get heavy or my head nodding - -
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