Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool: A Year in an American High School (review)

Aggie can no longer keep up her little motel off the main highway leading to the Smoky Mountains, so she regretfully puts it up for sale. Now that his wife's left him, Willow's dad is looking for some purpose in life, and running a little motel is exactly it. Kirby, a boy with a passel of behavior problems, is being carted off to a boarding school for troubled kids when his mom's car breaks down near a little motel in the Smokies. Loretta, who has just received a box full of mementos from her deceased birth mother, is on a pilgrimage with her loving adoptive parents to places her mother might have visited: first stop, the Smoky Mountains. The four families converge at Aggie's Sleepy Time Motel, and as the building ownership is transferred, the three tween-agers strike up a tentative friendship that draws each beyond his or her own concerns. O'Connor isn't quite as agile with the alternating point-of-view chapters as she has been in straightforward narration (most recently, How to Steal a Dog, BCCB 6/07), and the kids—particularly Pollyanna-ish Loretta—are more obviously typecast than her previous players. Still, O'Connor fans have come to expect satisfying endings all around, and they won't be disappointed here as Kirby and Willow and Loretta, with their attitudes and prospects adjusted, make plans to meet again at the newly renamed Mountainview Inn, which Aggie will happily still call home.