Crazy Vanilla

Not the best of Wersba books although packed with enough 'teenage reader' issues - gay brother, alcoholic mother, distant and unfeeling father, lonely and isolated younger son, girl friend with hippy mother plus boyfriends . . . Well, it's better than that catalogue suggests. There's enough skill to make some of the relationships matter and it's interesting to have a boy weak and almost passive and a strong, resolute and independent girl. They meet through their love of photography and wild birds, and another nice touch is the way the girl, Mitzi, teaches Tyler that his pictures suffer from sentimentality. That's thoroughly believable. Something the book struggles against too.