Koss (The Trouble with Zinny Weston) portrays Hillary with such sympathy and wit that readers understand her Watchers game as a comic expression of the loneliness Hillary cannot express. She wonders if buildings, towns and even people really exist or are merely images planted in her imagination by invisible ""Watchers,"" who wait to see how she will react to new settings and situations.
Ages 10-14.Seventh-grader Hillary has moved around so much that nothing in her environment seems to have a past or a future.
Budding postmodernists may enjoy this others may find the exhaustive telling. She relays not only what happens, but what might have happened, why she does or does not know what happens, why she does or does not remember to relay what happens, etc. The breathless narrator makes a show of constantly interrupting herself (e.g., "You may feel that this chapter is beside the point, but this entire story is so pointy that just about everything Koss understands the dynamics of junior high friendships, attractions and cliques, and she develops the ramifications of the romantic triangle with easy authenticity. One day Bess, one of Abby's two best friends, announces that Zack is cute, and 20 pages later, Bess secures Zack's affections by informing him that she likes him.
In what she concedes is "microscopic detail," the narrator describes how Abby has always been infatuated with her classmate Zack. Wordsmith, for whom she is drafting this opus. The narrator, the 16-year-old sister of one of the trio, openly addresses the audience and her teacher, Mr. Flouting the classic dictum that storytellers should show, not tell, Koss ( The Girls) chatters her way through this novel, talking out each angle of the tempest-in-a-teapot that upsets three seventh-grade girls.
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