My One Hundred Adventures

By Author: endeavor
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The daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, 12-year-old Jane struggles with what she believes in her tiny New England town by the sea.

Rather than letting the summer slip by, Jane sets out to find 100 adventures in search of answers. She seeks guidance from Nellie Phipps, the town preacher who claims psychic abilities, and under Nellie's tutelage, Jane is strong-armed into delivering bibles to strangers.

The pair steals a hot air balloon so Jane can make sky-born Biblical deliveries to the countryside. Unfortunately, one of the books lands on a baby's head, causing potentially permanent damage. To make matters worse, the baby's mother, Mrs. Gourd, hints at suing Jane's mother, so Jane must agree ...
... to baby-sit her flock of children every day until the beginning of school.

The summer appears to be ruined, but because adventure comes with the unknown, Jane continues to find new challenges in 14, not 100, adventures. To begin with, the Gourd family is almost the opposite of her own. Mrs. Gourd is mean and conniving and lives with her drunken husband in a trailer of filth. At her own home, a series of mysterious men, who might or might not be her father, vie for her mother's affection by cooking dinners, playing with her little brothers and sister, and shopping for antiques.

Jane's best friend, Ginny, dreams only of designing dresses, but when her mother crushes that dream, Ginny runs off to New York all by herself, leaving everyone worried. Also, there are the old ladies at church. Mrs. Parks, thought to be dying of thrombosis, drives her car through the window of the Dairy Queen, and Mrs. Nasters, who is dying of cancer, struggles to survive. The problems of summer come to a head when Mr. Gourd tries to kidnap Jane in an alcohol-induced rage, revealing some of the truth behind the Gourd family struggles.

This book will appeal to middle school girls and anyone who has a love for poetry. In the opening pages, Jane says, "Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. So summer comes to me" (p. 2).

It is in these layers that Horvath has woven a book that tenderly wraps readers in the heroine's interiority through sentences that gallop across the page in a stunning but quiet grace. Jane's voice floats sentence after sentence, creating bubbles of poetry bursting through prose in a quirky odyssey of self discovery.