All You Get Is Me

February 14, 2011
Prinz (The Vinyl Princess) infuses romance into a heated battle for justice in this provocative novel starring Aurora, a resilient, displaced city girl who loves photography. After her troubled mother left home two years ago, Aurora's attorney father "up and bought a farm like he was running out for a quart of milk." Now, instead of roaming the streets of San Francisco's Mission district, Aurora's days are spent in rural California gathering eggs and selling her father's organic produce. Her life takes another unexpected turn after she and her father witness a deadly car accident. Aurora's enraged father wants to bring a lawsuit against the careless driver who took a Mexican worker's life, but others in town—both whites and Mexicans—would rather keep things quiet. While her father's actions create controversy and danger for the family, Aurora is falling in love with the son of the guilty driver. Internal and external conflicts are vividly expressed as tensions rise in the community, and Aurora's loyalties are tested. While resolutions feel a bit contrived, Aurora's introspective narration and Prinz's well-drawn characterizations sustain this judicious story. Ages 14–up.

November 15, 2010

Aurora Audley, better known as Roar, loves SLR cameras, music from the 1970s and properly spelled-out e-mails, but the oddness of her tastes in a 21st-century heroine goes as unremarked in this bland, clumsy drama as her unfittingly fierce nickname. After her mother, an alcoholic, disappears, Roar and her do-gooder father move to the country to take up sustainable farming. One morning, the two witness an accident: Connie Gilwood, a rude, impatient white woman in an SUV, collides with an undocumented Mexican worker, who is killed in the crash. Wanting to champion the downtrodden, Roar's father pushes to file a civil suit despite many migrant workers' wishes—the dubious politics of which the author barely addresses. In the meantime, Roar begins a summer romance with Forest, Gilwood's son, who is largely unfazed when Roar testifies against his mother. Similarly anticlimactic resolutions of the lawsuit and Roar's eventual reconnection with her mother, as well as a host of stereotypical side characters, add little to the ineffectual story. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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February 1, 2011

Gr 9 Up-Many issues are crammed into this coming-of-age novel-the politics of illegal immigration and the rights of migrant farmworkers; dealing with abandonment by a depressed, alcoholic mother; and adjusting to life on an organic farm after growing up in San Francisco-but the heart of this book is a love story. Aurora, 15, and her father witness a car accident in which a Mexican woman illegally in the United States is killed by a reckless driver. Roar's dad, a former human-rights lawyer turned farmer, urges the remaining family to press a civil suit. Fearing his reaction to her blossoming relationship with the son of the woman responsible for the accident, Aurora hides her growing feelings for Forest. A sweet first love unfolds over the course of the summer and culminates in Aurora's tenderly described first sexual experience. The writing is fluid and the plot moves quickly, but it is grounded by descriptions of summer on a vegetable farm. This book should appeal to fans of Sarah Dessen and contemporary romance.-Caroline Tesauro, Radford Public Library, VA

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.