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Richie's Picks: WAITING FOR NORMAL by Leslie Connor, HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen, February 2008, 290p., ISBN: 978-0-06-0189088-9; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-06-089089-6 "I had two boxes of mac and cheese, almost half a box of Cheerios, a sleeve of saltine crackers, a bag of egg noodles and a box of brownie mix. In the can department, I had two tomato soups, one fruit cocktail, and one cheapy tuna -- the squishy, cat food kind. There were two eggs in the fridge, along with four carrots, half a quart of milk and almost half a jar of peanut butter. There were three hamburger buns in the freezer. It didn't look like much but I had things figured out. Each box of mac and cheese would make two meals. Each can of tomato soup was ten and three quarters ounces of pure possibility. I could mix it with the cooked egg noodles and cat tuna. I could pour it over a toasted hamburger bun. Or, I could just make soup like the label on the can said. But whatever I did, I had to be careful about the groceries. Mommers had been gone for six nights in a row." There is something seriously wrong with the mother of sixth-grader Addie Schmeeter. Addie's mother is way, way up or way, way down, seriously all here or seriously all gone. She either ignores the grocery situation for weeks on end or suddenly begins shopping (and cooking) for an army. And it can all change in a heartbeat. When she's around, Addie's mother is chronically obsessed with watching a television courtroom reality show or spending all night in an online chat room, she has no room in her consciousness for daily care of her offspring. Recent times have been bad: Addie's mother kicked Addie's good-hearted step-dad, Dwight, out of their old house. Then she misappropriated the mortgage money and took off for days at a time, leaving Addie alone to care for her two little sisters, Brynna and Katie. As a result, the subsequent divorce has ended with the house being gone, Dwight gaining full custody of Brynna and Katie, and Addie and her mom have moved into a funky little trailer in a seriously run-down section of urban Schenectady, New York. There is also something wrong with Addie: "Why was it so hard? My teacher and I had gone through my entire writer's notebook and had highlighted every left-hand margin in bright pink. When I wrote, I was supposed to come back and bump that pink edge with the first letter of every new line. It seemed like kindergarten stuff. But if I got my mind going on the words, I started to miss the margin. If I concentrated on the margin, I forgot what I was writing." The same struggle Addie has with her writer's notebook is also apparent when she is having to use a placeholder while reading a book or -- even worse -- trying to read the swirling music notation for the flute she so loves to play. Of course, the degree of responsibility Addie's mother displays for musical instruments is comparable to that of her parenting and grocery shopping and so, on top of everything else, Addie is burdened with the guilt of playing a flute that should have been returned to her previous school. On the plus side of Addie's ledger is Soula, the woman who runs the filling station and minimart across the road from the trailer, and Soula's friend, Elliot. There is ex-step-father Dwight who had, in fact, tried to gain custody of Addie during the divorce. There is Addie's guinea pig, Piccolo. And there is Addie's resolute attitude that she is waiting for normal and that it will, eventually, arrive. But as things keep getting better and better for Addie's sisters, Addie is stuck in the trailer with her mother, a mother who is becoming more and more unpredictable and irresponsible. And Soula, on whom Addie depends for some sanity, is clearly struggling with significant physical ailments. The closest I ever came to Schenectady, New York was having taken Amtrak through there on my way to a dairy goat convention in Syracuse back in the early Eighties. Leslie Connor thinks of this story as a love letter back to the little city outside of which she grew up. I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of place portrayed such as including the connections to Union College, the toxic waste, and the (real-life) Freeman's Bridge out of the city that one approaches via the road which the trailer is situated alongside of. I got thoroughly caught up in WAITING FOR NORMAL. The nearly-three-hundred pages went zipping by as quickly as the trains that send Addie's little trailer rocking every time they pass by overhead. The ten-to-fourteen-year-old set are going to seriously love the drama, the danger, the hope, and the isolation of Addie's waiting: "So this is the smell and the feel of Halloween this year, I told myself. No sweets. No trick-or-treating. No candy bars to sort and trade. No fun. No Dwight, no Brynna, no Katie. I looked at the dark trailer. No Mommers." Richie Partington, MLIS Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/) Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_ (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/) _BudNotBuddy@aol.com_ (mailto:BudNotBuddy@aol.com) _http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks) **************Get trade secrets for amazing burgers. Watch "Cooking with Tyler Florence" on AOL Food. (http://food.aol.com/tyler-florence?video=4&?NCID=aolfod00030000000002) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note: All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law. You can prevent most e-mail filters from deleting LM_NET postings by adding LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU to your e-mail address book. 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