Neighborhood Girls

June 15, 2017
Sometimes being popular is an act of survival.Wendy's friends provide a wall of protection from the accusing stares and even physical violence that come her way as a result of her police-officer father's crimes. But when high jinks and spirited pranks turn hateful and even illegal, the white teen finds herself caught between what is right and what is easiest. To make her junior year even more confusing, the Catholic school she's attended forever is scheduled to be closed down at the end of the year. Wendy will have to become acclimated to a public school for her senior year. Then there's the fact that her mother is working overtime on a regular basis, and Wendy can't figure out how to deal with her father's absence. Foley (The Carnival at Bray, 2014) delivers a compelling story about a confused girl who remains likable even as she follows through on bad choices and keeps mistaking carelessness for connection. The sheer number of tragic events does detract from the overall experience of the book, but the realistic, fully fleshed characters, some of whom are described as people of color, help keep the narrative enjoyable. The city of Chicago itself is its own fascinating character. A riveting tale about a troubled teen finding her way through the wilds of high school life. (Fiction. 14-18)

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September 1, 2017

Gr 8 Up-Wendy Boychuck knows that her junior year at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Chicago will be a nightmare of shame after her father is convicted and imprisoned for extreme police brutality. But when she is accepted as the fourth bestie of superficially popular Kenzie, she gladly joins that circle, thinking they will shield her from the confrontations of being the daughter of a ruthless cop. Wendy abandons her true best friend, talented violinist Alexis, and takes on a false new image to fit in. Further complications and conflicts impact Wendy's multifaceted life. She ignores her father in jail while muddling through with school, a job, and a chin-up mother who is working extra hours. Wendy struggles with the academy closing and facing public school for senior year. The teen tries to meet the expectations of her supposed new friends who party and disobey rules. However, when Kenzie destroys Alexis's valuable violin, it's a well-timed and believable wake-up call. Wendy finally resolves to be true to herself by leaving Kenzie's bad-news group, reconnecting with Alexis, and contemplating a promising, unexpected romance when a foreshadowed yet still shocking tragedy flips Wendy's world. Readers will sympathize with and root for the protagonist as she steers toward several optimistic and uplifting paths by acknowledging her own scruples. VERDICT Vibrant and convincing writing with realistic outcomes by a Morris Award finalist and Printz honoree make this a winner for most teen fiction collections.-Diane P. Tuccillo, Poudre River Public Library District, CO

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Starred review from July 1, 2017
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Foley's anticipated second book takes on Chicago police brutality with a tough, sensitive, and modern sensibility. Much like her widely lauded debut (The Carnival at Bray, 2014), Foley's second novel is a blistering coming-of-age story, centered around a girl with a troubled family and imbued with music. This time, though, instead of the frenzied, near-religious fever-dream of nineties grunge rock, it's blue-collar, steel-scented Americana. Wendy Boychuck, a lifelong resident of Chicago's Jefferson Park neighborhood, is named not for the flighty darling of Peter Pan but rather for the girl in Bruce Springsteen's seminal Born to Run, a song that has always featured heavily on the soundtrack of her life. It was Springsteen, in fact, who blared through the CD player when her father's fellow cops arrived not to shoot the breeze but to arrest him. For Wendy, her father's 17-year prison sentence comes with a distinct loss of faith: a crooked cop, he was found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and torture and aggravated battery in the interrogation room, and Wendy struggles to rationalize the coexistence of the father she has loved with the villain the city hates. As the daughter of Chicago's now most notorious cop, Wendy faces her own set of problems, and, scared and confused as her family falls apart, she puts up her own set of defenses. Abandoning her loyal best friend, Wendy takes up with her school's most popular and vicious set of girls: Emily, Sapphire, and ringleader Kenzie. This is her armor: friendship that never goes too deep, a clique that safeguards her from the whispers of the world. Two years after her father's arrest, Wendy is a junior at a small, all-girls Catholic school, still wrestling with that loss of faith and the decisions she's made to protect herself. It would have been easy for Foley to fall into the trap of a sophomore slump. After all, this contains much of what made The Carnival at Bray such a sleeper success: a girl struggling to grow up amid loss, a music-driven narrative, a story firmly rooted in a sense of place. But Neighborhood Girls is no mere re-creation. Where Carnival was steeped in nineties nostalgia and the magic of Europe, this is a heartbreakingly modern representation of a city at the heart of America, propelled by Wendy's singular, matter-of-fact voice. Though rarely mentioned explicitly, the story surrounding Wendy's father's arrest is rife with the underlying racial tensions that make Chicago what it is. It's uncomfortably easy to translate Stephen Boychuck's language as he tries to justify his actions: In my dad's stories, Wendy recalls, he was the great force that strode through the neighborhood, protecting the hardworking normal people and destroying the gangbangers and thugs. So, too, is it easy to picture exactly the man Wendy describes when she speaks of her father. After all, she muses as she and her mother drive through quiet farmlands to visit him in a Nebraska prison, Steve Boychuck was Chicago: corrupt, brash, proud, thick-wristed and dark-mustached, full of quick anger and fierce love in equal measure. How could he survive out here in this quiet, polite, decent stretch of America? How could he even make sense? It is the struggle to make sense of things that dogs Wendy over the course of her junior year of high school. With years of Catholic education behind her, she has a baseline for faith, if not a direction. Even as she takes refuge in friendships, toxic as they may be, Wendy searches for something bigger, whether it's through a school legend about the weeping portrait of a saint, a ghost-hunting aunt, or a misguided tattoo. But even as Wendy...