Review: For Keeps - Natasha Friend

Where I got it: ARC from Penguin Book Group
Rating: 3.5 stars
Cover Rating: 3.5 stars (this is a very 3.5 book. Also, I think they changed the final cover.)
Genre: Young Adult
Publication Date: April 6, 2010
Publisher: Viking Juvenile
Page Count: 267 p.

Josie Gardner and her mother were a pair. Josie never met her father who moved away when her mom was pregnant. One day Josie and her mom spot Paul Tucci's (her father) parents in a store. Josie has to calm her mom down so that she doesn't have to keep hiding in the pet food aisle. Her mom soon after takes on a new boyfriend, who's a little weird and clingy. Josie starts up a relationship and her friend Liv starts up a non-relationship. Things seem to settle back to normal until Josie starts to uncover some truths neither she nor her mom were prepared to face.

This was a great book. Fortunately I was not in Josie's fatherless situation, but it made it a little hard to understand what she was going through at times. Natasha is a great writer though and kept me hooked until the very end. The characters all were very teenagery. They were jerks and smelly and mean and funny and young and hopeless. Love was in the air, or maybe just pheromones. Either way this was a delightful read about a girl who wasn't trying to figure out who she was but instead had her identity thrust upon her by coincidence.

First Line:
"It's the last Friday night in August, and instead of dancing on a table at Melanie Jaffin's party with the rest of the soon-to-be junior class, I am crouched behind a tower of Meow Mix in the pet-food aisle of Shop-Co, watching my mother hyperventilate."

Favorite Line:
"Do you know how many billions of bacteria infest the average surface of a public building? Do you know how many billions of microorganisms enter the pores of your skin through contact alone?"