Fourteen-year-old friends in pre-cell-phone summer in the small town of Seldem, PA, do some growing and changing. Hector, inspired by a coffee house performance he attends with his older sister, takes up guitar. Debbie helps a neighbor, and develops a crush (mutual) on her visiting great-nephew. Lenny fixes things, teaches Debbie to drive, and listens to a radio show. Thin on plot, perhaps, but strong on character and setting. The characters seem slightly older than 14; it feels like YA rather than middle grade, but maybe that's because there's so little upper middle grade/young YA out there.

Quotes

Have you ever been somewhere, and it hit you that if you lived there instead of where you do, your whole life might be really different? (89)

I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn't know how to be my own age. (Debbie, 126)

"I really like how when you go somewhere for the first time, everything seems unusual." (Peter to Debbie, 258)

They were both trying to be quiet; every bump and scrape seemed to tear holes in the silence. (297)

He had always been able to get away with things. The flip side was that no one took him seriously. (Hector, 304) ( )

This book follows a group of friends on the cusp of adolescence, as they explore new ideas, find new interests, and form first crushes. The plot structure is very loose and episodic; the content is rooted in nostalgia. There are occasional illustrations that don't do a whole lot for the story. Set in a small town in the 1970s, I found myself wondering what sort of appeal this book would have for young readers today. It won the Newbery Medal in 2006, inexplicably. This reads like a book for adults who grew up in the 1970s, and not a book for children at all. The writing is good, and the characters are interesting, if not always fully realized (I had trouble distinguishing some of the boys, particularly, and Debbie's best friend Patty has no personality to speak of), but there's so little action that I really had to push myself to stay engaged. I wouldn't recommend this for kids, but adults who were teenagers in the '70s might find it a nice walk down memory lane. ( )

This one was just ok. It was pretty slow and I expected WAY more to happen given the synopsis and tag on the book. It is a middle grade which I usually have difficult time getting thru anyway but this was just so mundane! I mean pretty much just changing perspectives of about six 14 year olds during the start of summer. I could see how it would be a good read for that age group. ( )

The characters who live in this book are at one of the major theory-forming times of life, and they are forming theories about everything from why there are so many black plastic combs lying on the ground to what Albert Einstein would have done if he were born an Eskimo. (Amazing things with blubber and ice.)
They are also saving lives (Debbie), writing songs (Hector), and working up the courage to say, “Hello” (everyone).
I read somewhere that one of the rules of writing romantic teen fiction is that there has to be a prom at the end, or a prom equivalent. This is the kind where that doesn’t happen. Well, there is that one time, with Debbie and Peter, but does it count? And will it ever happen again? And what are you supposed to do in the meantime?
If there is anyone out there who has ever wondered about things like this, I want to tell them that it’s okay. Or as Hector says in what might be his best song, even though he hasn’t written the verses yet: "and it’s fine, totally fine, totally fine all of the time." ( )

Debbie wants life to be different. She thinks that she has to go to other places to make this happen. The author of this book writes it so that Debbie can stay in one place and learn to see that change and life are all around us where we are.