The novel takes a completely unexpected turn midway. And those characters are fun to read about.Īt first they edged towards the too-good-to-be-true column in my reader’s analysis, but then explanations began to fall into place, and I was on board.Īnd, anyway, it’s certainly not a too-good-to-be-true tale. And Amber has a set of seven happy memories about her life with her mom that stand in contrast to some of the hard bits nowadays. Okay, a stretch from Hardy and Tolstoy, but less than ten pages into the novel, I realized that this isn’t going to be the light reading I’d expected.īut there are certainly aspects of Amber’s life with her mom, on Hello Yellow, the schoolbus her mom drives - their belongings stored in the two storage bins beneath the wheels so that nobody ever sees them - that are positive. “Another thing: Mom’s taste in men is akin to a crackhead’s taste in crack cocaine.

I worried that I wasn’t as far from those two exhausting classic novels as I’d thought. She certainly has so many different names for her dog that she could slip him into a Russian novel with the appropriate amount of confusing nomenclature. Oh dear: is Amber just Tess of the D’Urbervilles dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt? Homelessness reflects badly on both of us. I took it home from the library with some quite-possibly-bleak-but-brilliant Canlit and considered myself lucky.īut here’s Amber, only a few pages in: “I mean it’s a pretty pathetic story, and I’m not really all that proud to be my mom’s daughter right now.

In a reading month that included War and Peace and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, you can imagine that I was craving something a little lighter.Įnter Amber Appleton and her loyal dog, Bobby Big Boy, in the pages of this brightly covered YA novel.

Sorta like a rock star