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Overview
That's all Buddy wants -- a normal family. But with her mother dead, her father missing, and her brother on the road searching for him, Buddy has a hard time believing it will ever happen. Instead she's living with relatives she hardly knows who resent her for reasons she can't figure out. They think everything about her is strange, especially her name.Buddy can't give up hope -- that her father is out there, somewhere, and that her brother will find him so they can be a family again. But until then can Buddy find some way to accept her new life? Or will she always feel different?
When her father disappears mysteriously on a trucking job, eleven-year-old Buddy moves in with relatives she hardly knows and finds herself in a dysfunctional family with secrets about the past.
Synopsis
That's all Buddy wants -- a normal family. But with her mother dead, her father missing, and her brother on the road searching for him, Buddy has a hard time believing it will ever happen. Instead she's living with relatives she hardly knows who resent her for reasons she can't figure out. They think everything about her is strange, especially her name.
Buddy can't give up hope -- that her father is out there, somewhere, and that her brother will find him so they can be a family again. But until then can Buddy find some way to accept her new life? Or will she always feel different?
Children's Literature
Eleven-year-old Amy Kate, called Buddy, and her seventeen-year-old brother Bart can't pay the rent because their dad has disappeared on a business trip. Bart sends Buddy to stay with hard-up Montana relatives while he hunts for Dad. Buddy's dead mother's sisters, Cassie and Addie, live with their 92-year-old grandfather, who is going senile; Cassie's stepson Max and his alcoholic father are the last members of what Max calls "this dysfunctional family." Her aunts dislike Buddy's dead mother, why she can't imagine, until she discovers that they think Mama stole a large sum of Grandpa's money. Buddy determines to clear Mama's name. The return of Dad and the lost money lead to family reconciliation and Buddy's decision to be known as Amy Kate from now on. Aunt Cassie's home-cooked meals will nourish young readers through the too-talky parts, while new excitements in each chapter will pull middle-grade readers to the grand finale. 2001, Atheneum, $16.00. Ages 9 to 12. Reviewer: Nancy Tilly