HOW FAR WOULD YOU HAVE GOTTEN IF I HADN'T CALLED YOU BACK? An ALA Best Book 1995 Publisher's Weekly Starred Review Kirkus Starred Review (ages 12 and up)

What's it all about?

It is 1960, and 16-year-old Bronwyn Lewis' father has moved the family from New Jersey to Ojala, California. Street-smart Bron is caught offguard by the effortless cool of her new classmates. To make it in Ojala, Bron will have to remake herself. And so she puts aside her studies to drag-race, hang out--and meets the two men who will change her life.

Read an excerpt

Until school began that fall, I read three-inch dollar fifty trash novels, Love's Sweet Sorrow, Mandingo, or walked the back streets kicking dust through my sandals, crying. There was nothing I could do, nothing to turn my parents around, nothing I could say to make them understand how completely they'd ruined my life. They'd stopped hearing me. I meant nothing to them. But soon the tears stopped and I became dry and parsimonious as the landscape.

For an Easterner, walking those back streets was like exploring a strange planet or a movie set left standing long after the film had been made, The Grapes of Wrath, High Noon. There were no lawns -- I supposed, wrongly, that Ojalans were simply too lazy to tend them -- and no sidewalks. None of the flowers I knew, the white tulips mom planted and replanted each fall (had she brought them with her?), the wild narcissus and clouds of yellow forsythia we kids would pass each spring on the way to the bus stop, none of these grew here.

Here, exotic ugly plants grew in globular or spiny profusion with red or yellow prickly blossoms sticking to their hides. Enormous trees that smelled of mentholatum dwarfed single story mud huts (the adobe I had no name for then) so that they appeared even smaller than they were and less substantial. Beneath the trees and clear across the roads lay curls of dried bark that cracked when you stepped on it, releasing puffs of dusty brown smoke into the air.

Nurturing my homesickness to a fine art, I remembered only what was good about Plainfield. I remembered particularly the way a winter snow would settle on everything as I slept, so that I would awaken to a magical transformed world of white heaps and hills and the tops of Christmas trees I hadn't realized had been there all along. I would recapture in memory the smell of hay in the Fall -- dried stalks of wheat in the field across from our house, gathered and bunched at the top like witches' hats, what it felt like to cut a perfect figure eight on Badgley's Pond, fireflies, the taste of snowcream. Here, everything -- houses, cars, sleeping dogs-- wore a coat of fine reddish-brown dust. It got in your eyes and your hair as you walked, so that after a while you could taste it.

I must have walked every back street, muttering to myself like someone old and half mad. And then one afternoon I glanced up from my sandals and saw for the first time a small church I must have passed a dozen times. It was badly in need of paint but its gold cross shone as if someone climbed the steeple every morning to polish it. The Lord giveth, The Lord taketh away, said the weekly message board. I could not have agreed more. In the attached building, used I guessed for Sunday school classes, a door stood open and just inside the door was an upright piano. Glancing around and finding no one to stop me, I stepped inside.

The room was mostly bare. Chairs had been folded and stacked along one wall. There was only one picture, the one I thought Jesus would have liked best, with all the children and animals. Beneath the picture was the piano.

I lifted the lid. Not a key was chipped or scarred, just yellowed with age like a set of strong old teeth. Middle C sent a rippling reverberation through the room. When no one came I slid out the bench and sat down. The room was cool and dim. The one door leading into the church was closed. I played a scale, then a simple sonata. It was like releasing rusty water from a pump.

I never walked the main street, the other end of the avenue, where "the kids" were. They owned the town, these teenagers, and everyone seemed to know it: shopkeepers, gas station attendants, even the police chief who smiled and waved as if granting approval of everything they did.

From late afternoon until long past midnight, the kids would cruise Ojala Avenue, all three miles of it, back and forth, back and forth, in their spectacular cars. After a while, I knew all the cars and would watch for them: the candy apple pickup, the deep purple Chevy with the silver fins, the blue Olds convertible. The drivers, always boys, would honk their horns, wave, call out to each other or make obscene hand gestures.

Sometimes one of the more daring would leap from the backseat of one convertible (the blue Olds) into another (a white Ford with skinny stripes of red and gold), flat into the laps of his friends in the back. I'd sit on my father's new steps (we'd had to make a terrific fuss over them, how straight and even they were, what a magnificent job my father had done) and I'd watch the cars and all the waving arms shimmering and dancing through the heat waves like a non-stop Gidget movie. These were California kids.Everybody had heard of them. They were famous as the movie stars they imitated.

At noon they would gather at the Frostee, sprawl on the hoods of their cars or all over the blue Olds convertible, drinking cokes, laughing, always laughing. They all had perfect teeth. This was hard not to notice. Perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. From Bailey's Market across the way as I helped my father load bagsful of food into Bess' trunk, I'd watch these kids and study what they wore, how the girls did their hair. They were all very tan with impossibly long legs, boys and girls alike, California Barbies and Kens. They terrified me with their confidence, with their seeming hold on the world.

Reviews

"A powerful portrait of peer pressure, dysfunctional families, and the anomie that pervades so many aspects of American life. Will leave readers thoughtful and shaken." --Kirkus Reviews, pointer review

"Full of energy, confidence, and surprise. An enticing coming-of-age story, unerringly accurate in both its passions and its scenery," --Booklist