Ten Miles Past Normal

"I am Janie. Or, rather, I'd have liked to have been as cool as Janie when I was in high school. Like Janie, my parents moved from city to farm, although I was four at the time and started kindergarten in a new town after the move--so I didn't have to adjust from pre-farm to post-farm with my peer group. I was just "farm." (I'm the youngest of five kids, however; my elder sibs all have different perspectives on what that move meant in their lives.)<br/><br/>That being said, I now refer to myself as a child of the back-to-nature movement and didn't realize as I was living them what great fodder for later stories my childhood experiences would make. Chasing obstinate cows back into the pasture. Learning to shuck sunflower seeds. Living in a steamy house for days on end while my dad boiled maple sap into syrup in the basement. Now I joke that my Dad mowed the back yard and we got it for dinner: cattails, milkweed, lambs-quarters; put enough butter on it and it all tastes the same. Like Janie, I occasionally went to school smelling of farm life, mostly our sulfur-odored well-water. Reading Janie's tale of going to school with goat droppings on her shoes made me cringe. How well I remember the mortification when, on a particularly bad well-water day, one of the popular girls walked near me, clearly sniffed, wrinkled her nose, and moved away. Unlike Janie, I wasn't nearly as funny or cool about it. It didn't matter that my father was a college professor and only a part-time farmer. What mattered in the high school social scene was that I didn't have the right clothes (preppie), the right hairstyle (Farrah Fawcett), or the right perfume (Love's Baby Soft). Rather, I wore jeans and t-shirts, had a practical, short haircut that required minimal upkeep, and my perfume...well, see above comments. I could feel Janie.<br/><br/>I enjoyed this book, mostly due to being able to resonate with the childhood I think. But Frances Dowell does a great job with characters and, as always, the characters in this book are enjoyable, believable, and living out high school life in a way that I could certainly also resonate with. I was able to see myself and my friends in some of the characters as much as I was able to see my daughter and some of her friends in them. Janie suffers the pain of high school but doesn't dwell in it; rather, she finds ways to cope, stumbles into new friendships that sustain her, weathers a changing friendship that has been with her since her young childhood, and struggles in her perception of her mother--"is she cool or lame?"--as many of us do at that age. I really enjoyed the touch of contemporary reality in that Janie's mother is a blogger. Janie is concerned about how much of her life might be put on public display but also knows it's unlikely that most of her peer group reads blogs. (Blogging moms, take note.)<br/><br/>Yes, it's a young adult book and the target audience hovers around middle school or young high school age. But as an adult woman, as a mother--even though my kids are older than that now, and as a blogger myself, I enjoyed reading it as well."