Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #735934 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-27
• Released on: 2006-05-09
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.15" h x 5.92" w x 8.61" l, .89 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up Calliope once lived happily with her artist parents. Then her mother decided to find herself, and now she and her daughter pack up and go at a moment's notice, following Renaissance Faires around the country. Eliot once lived with his normal family on the Carolina coast where they were all very happy. Then his father found God and dragged them to the woods to start a Fat Camp based on the motto, What Would Jesus Eat? In alternating chapters, readers follow Cal and Eliot as they struggle with growing up, finding themselves, and finding one another. While each narrator has a clear and unique voice, the two work together in perfect harmony. Supporting characters all adults are well developed and distinctive. Reluctant teen readers may be drawn to this title by the bubble-gum-cutesy cover, but they will be hooked by the strong, quirky story of love and family. Morgan Johnson-Doyle, Sierra High School, Colorado Springs, CO
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Gr. 7-10. "My mother is a wench. It says so right on her W-2." Fifteen-year-old Calliope (Cal) is tired of sleeping in tents and following her free-spirited mother, who works at Renaissance fairs, selling handmade jewelry and serving drinks. She yearns for four walls, her father back in Texas, and a deeper sense of place, connection, and love. Then, while spending the summer in Asheville, North Carolina, Cal meets Elliot, also 15, whose father runs a Christian camp for overweight kids. Like David Levithan and Rachel Cohn's Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006), this coauthored love story unfolds in alternating chapters narrated in Cal and Elliot's hilarious, heart-tugging voices. Although the adult characters veer toward caricature, and the story's closing events feel a bit hasty and undeveloped, the authors raise a potentially routine summer romance into a refreshing, poetic, memorable story filled with the precise small details that nudge people toward love--from the sound of a necklace to the taste of homemade barbeque sauce. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved