Kumquat May, I'll Always Love You

Olivia (Liv) Greene lives alone. She explains early in this fun and witty book for Young Adults:"It hasn't been easy. Fifteen-year-old girls aren't supposed to live alone, which I was. Absolutely and abruptly. Grandmother had died the year before, and my father passed on to his reward when I was eleven. A promising lawyer and noted alcoholic, he died of acute procrastination at age thirty-four."Liv's free-spirit mother, Luna Lee, left the house to get some margarine two years ago and now sends an occasional post card from varying points along her aimless travels. Meanwhile, back in Kumquat, CA, ("three hours from Sacremento") Liv is holding house and hearth together - (think "Don't tell Mom, the Babysitter's Dead,") without allowing the small community to know that Momma's gone - lest Social Services whisk Liv off to live with Uncle Sargeant and Aunt Cec and their dreadful children in Seattle (think Harry Potter's Dursleys.) Liv is a bright, resourceful girl and the reader is absorbed in her trials and tribulations. "Funny, all the secrets in people's lives. We're icebergs, only the tips of us showing." ... "(Before she left,) Mother show(ed) me things I'd never noticed. On the Currier and Ives calendar in every home and store in town - gifts from the undertaker, time marches on, - she showed me that the faces of the quarter moon age, from babies in January, to children in April, to faces like Grandmother's in December. I've lived with those calendars all my life and had never seen those faces." Makes you want to run right out and check one of those calendars, eh? Me too!