UNDER THE WATSONS’ PORCH

Twelve-year-old Ellie Tremont has the blues until “bad boy” Tommy Bowers, who’s been shuffled to different families, moves in next door. Although not popular and usually dutiful, Ellie has a penchant for telling lies and wants more excitement in her boring world. She’s instantly intrigued by this boy with a past and has no intention of going to an all-girls summer camp now. Her mother quickly judges Tommy as a person to avoid, while Ellie has trouble reconciling Tommy’s shoplifting and the Saturday morning camp for the neighborhood children he creates under the elderly Watson sisters’ porch. Both begin to understand that Tommy’s camp is a way to create his own family and that he is neither a bad boy or a good boy, but just a boy—a lesson that unites mother and daughter after weeks of arguing. Sipping lemonade out of wine glasses and feeling goose bumps from Tommy’s touch, Ellie evokes the pangs of first love and the tension between eagerly leaving childhood behind and reluctantly embracing adolescence. (Fiction. 10-13)