Little Divas

January 9, 2006
Narrating Boles's (Blame It on Eve
, for adults) rather thin first novel for children is 12-year-old Cassidy, whose life is in flux. The African-American narrator's parents have recently divorced and she is living with her musician father while her mother spends a year in Africa. She laments that she and Rikki, her cousin and best friend, don't have as much fun together as they once did ("We used to do regular stuff, like riding our bikes all day but going nowhere"), ever since Rikki became obsessed with boys. And Cassidy feels betrayed by her father when she learns through others that he is contemplating sending her to a private school, and that he is dating. So Cassidy decides to turn the tables and keep some secrets from him. In an unduly protracted scene in which she gets her first kiss ("Will you be my lady?" the boy asks), she and her friends attend a pool party without telling their parents. A jarring conclusion finds Mary, Rikki's 16-year-old sister (whom the younger girls regularly cover for when she sneaks out to rendezvous with her boyfriend), returning home from a date to present Rikki, Cassidy and a new friend of theirs with condoms, insisting they are "never
... to do the grown up without one." Though Boles's amiable heroine weathers some credible, stormy changes, a surfeit of dialogue and extraneous detail slow the pace. Ages 10-up.