Me & Mom vs. the World

December 22, 2014
Thirteen-year-old Tori and her widowed mother have always been a team, but Tori feels like the adult in the relationship (an early scene has her mother hiding in a cupboard to scare Tori). Her mother’s dress shop is struggling, so Tori leaps at a surprise chance to inherit her late Great-Aunt Muriel’s estate. To do so, they must compete against the rest of the family in a “test of wit and will,” living as though in colonial times, without any modern conveniences, and winning challenges like cooking gruel and making arrows for target practice. A cute boy on the staff, conniving cousins, witch trials, and various surprises spice up Tori’s travails, and her dry humor is often downright hilarious. (“Maybe Mom and I didn’t need candles,” thinks Tori during a close encounter with lard. “Maybe we could just develop night vision, like owls, or scream at objects to find them, like bats.”) Making the most of a fun premise, Whittemore (D Is for Drama) adeptly fuses comic moments with a testy but loving mother-daughter relationship and intriguing details about 17th-century life. Ages 9–13. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency.