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Zusatztext It is a rare story for kids of this age that treats such matters with straight-forwardness and without mushy and ridiculously high hormonal responses. This is not Twilight ; it's a gentle story about two long-time friends and how they figure out who they are when one of them starts to see boys in a new light. There is a big adventure at the end! which ends up better than you would have thought when it started. There is no salacious gossipy junk to muddle up the story. Instead! Baskin writes real-life characters that kids will relate to! especially girls! and gives them a story they will take to heart because most readers will know that this is going to happen to them (or perhaps already has). It's a nice story about a normal part of the growing-up process! and readers and parents will appreciate Baskin's gentle but pointed storytelling techniques. THE SUMMER BEFORE BOYS is highly recommended for a tween's bookshelf --- right alongside all those books about your changing body and relationships. There is no AAA map to guide one through the craziness of puberty! but books such as these and protagonists like Julia and Eliza will surely cast some helpful glow on the proceedings. --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano Informationen zum Autor Nora Raleigh Baskin is the ALA Schneider Family Book Award–winning author of Anything But Typical . She was chosen as a Publishers Weekly Flying Start for her novel What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows , and has since written a number of novels for middle graders and teens, including The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah , The Summer Before Boys , and Ruby on the Outside . Nora lives with her family in Connecticut. Visit her at NoraBaskin.com.Summer Before Boys one M y Aunt Louisa, who is really my sister, snored like a machine with a broken part, a broken part that kept cycling around in a shuddering, sputtering rhythm. “Whistle with me,” Eliza said into the dark. “What?” We lay together in bed, in Eliza’s room that was really not a room, but a part of the den that had been sectioned off with a thin portable wall. Each night either Aunt Louisa, or Uncle Bruce, who is really my brother-in-law, pulled out “the wall,” like stretching an accordion as far as it would go. Then Eliza would yank her bed right out of the couch and we would both slip under the cool sheets and the thin cotton blanket. It was summer. The summer I spent living with Eliza, who is really my niece, but since we are both twelve years old that feels kind of stupid. So we just tell everyone we are cousins. And it was the summer before boys. “If you whistle, she stops snoring,” Eliza told me. “Really?” “Really. Watch.” Mostly Eliza was my best friend. We both went to New Hope Middle School, but I lived in town, on Main Street. And Eliza lived way up here, right at the base of the Cayuga Mountain, right at the gatehouse entrance to the Mohawk Mountain Lodge. She lived at the foot of a magical place and now I got to live there too. For the whole summer. Because my dad, who is technically Eliza’s grandfather, had to work. And so there was no one home to watch me. And because my mom got deployed to Iraq nine and a half months ago. Eliza whistled one long, clear, unwavering note. It floated out of the perfect circle she made with her lips and into the air. Her whistle slipped right under “the wall” that didn’t quite touch the floor, or the ceiling, so that Eliza’s room was lit with flickering gray light from the television set left on all night. Her whistle carried through the den and into Aunt Louisa and Uncle Bruce’s bedroom. And the snoring stopped, just like that.
