In the background the two mothers renew their friendship each year, and Lauren, Belly’s mother, provides support for her friend-if not, unfortunately, for the children-in Susannah’s losing battle with breast cancer. Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.īelly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons. Tobin’s own blossoming, through friendship, and the rediscovery of his family, and the love for and of his chickens, is entirely satisfying-just right. Remarkably enough, the Social Services intervention turns out to be just the right thing to pull the family back together, but the process unfolds so unpresumptuously that readers will be rooting for them all the way. Tobin narrates his story, his voice appealingly self-deprecatory and earthy. Aside from having a passel of criminal siblings, Tobin’s mother has died, his father parents by neglect and his feisty Granny’s interference has landed him in foster care. Why now, then, does Henry the new kid, seem to want to adopt him as a bosom buddy? Despite himself, Tobin finds himself falling into a friendship with Henry and his little brother Harrison, and pretty soon, he’s raising chickens as part of a joint scientific-entrepreneurial project the two brothers have cooked up. Seventh-grader Tobin has pretty much flown under the radar most of his life, only stealing a paper clip now and then to prove his relationship to the rest of his juvenile-delinquent family.
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