I Kissed Shara Wheeler

     "Shame is a way of life here.  It's stocked in the vending machines, stuck like gum under the desks, spoken in the morning devotionals.  She knows now that there's a bit of it her.  It was an easy choice not to go back in the closet when she got here, but if she'd grown up here, she might never have come out at all."

     Here is False Beach, the town that Chloe, narrator of Casey McQuiston's I Kissed Shara Wheeler, and her two moms moved  to from California at the beginning of high school.

     "It's just a town by some water where nothing interesting ever happens.  And, in what Chloe has learned is the nature of small towns, when one thing does happen, everyone knows about it.  Which means that by Monday morning, all anyone wants to talk about is where Shara could have gone."

     Shara is more than just a classmate.  She's the daughter of Principal Wheeler, the evangelical Christian law and order principal of Willowgrove Christian Academy.  In fact Chloe first saw Shara on a forty feet wide billboard advertising the school.  Shara is adored by most of her classmates for being smart, kind, talented, and "the football team's good luck charm". So when Shara vanishes into thin air right after the prom, despite her father's best efforts to deflect gossip, it's front page news.

     But it looks like Shara wants to be found.  Before she went missing she kissed an unlikely trio:

*Chloe who has all through high school seen her as her only serious rival for valedictorian;

*Smith, the football player boyfriend with whom until their recent breakup, she had been the school's alpha couple;

and *Rory, the boy next door (in Shara's ritzy gated community) who deliberately projects a bad boy image and may be harboring a crush.

She's also left them a series of cryptic clues on fancy pink stationary that will require a lot of risk taking including rule breaking to unravel.  In the process they'll discover a lot of people aren't who they appear to be--including Shara herself and her supposedly ultra virtuous dad.

     Although a delightful rom com, I Kissed Shara Wheeler also makes some pretty deep observations about the darker side of high school dynamics and Evangelical Christianity.  McQuiston wrote the book because " I know intimately that the Bible Belt contains some of the best, warmest, weirdest, queerest kids you'll ever meet, whether or not they even know that last part yet.  If you're one of those kids, I wanted this book to exist for you.  I think if it had existed for me back then, a lot of things in my life would have been different.  I wanted to write a book to show you that you're not alone."

On a purrrsonal note, it's Friday and I am more than ready.  If we go to camp fine.  If we don't fine.  I have a bunch of things I can do and not just homework.  Draw a picture or two in my sketchbook which I've been neglecting horribly.  I want to have some new work in it for when I go to the Big City in case I see Ann, Jacob's mom, who is a professional artist.  Bake cookies.  Make a new scrapbook out of family photos to bring to the Big City.  And of course get in a little extra reading.  Today on my way home I'm going to drop by Orono Public Library to do a little shelf reading. (Jules)

My plans: make sure no mice invade the house, play, eat, nap, watch the neighborhood, get belly rubs.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to you, our fabulous readers, with best wishes for a great last weekend of summer.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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