WHEN JFK WAS MY FATHER

A believable look at life in boarding school in the 1960s, made surreal by the narrator’s fantasy that she is John F. Kennedy’s daughter, and her conversations with the school’s long-dead founder. Right before they separate, Georgia’s mother and father take her on vacation to a resort not far from their home in Rio de Janeiro. Georgia, shy and confused, meets Tim, a sensitive boy who shares her interest in stamps and whose parents are just as screwed-up as hers are. Their idyll is short-lived; soon Georgia’s father is in Rio with his girlfriend, her mother settles into Washington, D.C., and Georgia is off to Connecticut, to the only boarding school that will take her. As she retreats more and more into a fantasy that her real father is JFK, Georgia has trouble finding friends, doesn’t like her teachers, and ends up with a terrible report card. In her head she talks to Mrs. Beard, the down-to-earth founder of the school, deceased but apparently still able to help Georgia out of a jam. Tim makes a reappearance; he’s run away from a nearby boy’s school, but now he seems more peculiar than poetic. He wants Georgia to run away with him, but she, learning of the uproar at the school in the early hours of her disappearance and reeling from the news that JFK has been assassinated, decides that the students and teachers are her real family and refuge. Gordon’s title and the premise offer more to adults than young readers, who won’t understand the romantic hold JFK had on the country; Georgia’s fantasy never rises above the level of a silly conceit. Aspects of the setting, both in Brazil and Connecticut, are powerfully realized, as is Mrs. Beard: even dead and without a ghostly form, she may be the most compelling character on the scene. (Fiction. 10-13)