Whatever Normal Is

Age range 12+

After three years of high school, Margaret still isn't any closer to what she wants: to sing and dance on Broadway, to be a model like Twiggy, to be madly in love with someone other than Paul McCartney. It's not much to ask, but with her friends Grace and Isabelle, she's willing to adjust her goals for the summer to a job, a car, and a boyfriend.

When Grace gets a job downtown at the Emerald Cafe, where Teddy, a dreamy college kid, tends the meat buffet, it looks like she, at least, is almost halfway there—until Teddy asks for Margaret's phone number. As the old friends, with adulthood looming, navigate the newly confusing territory of love and sexuality and identity, everything they thought they knew is suddenly, frighteningly thrown into question—and they discover that between the dream of stardom and the certainty of housekeeping there's a vast unsuspected world of peril and possibility.

Jane St. Anthony keenly captures the essence of coming of age: that irreversible moment of discovery that the world is much greater and deeper than you have imagined—and that other people's lives are as big as your own. - Jane O'Reilly, author of The Secret of Goldenrod