Stealing Parker (review)

When Parker's mother comes out, Parker's family falls apart: her brother turns to drugs, her father reads his Bible and accepts the harsh judgments of his church friends, and Parker herself gives up her beloved softball and takes up kissing guys in order to prove that she's nothing like her mother. At the behest of her best friend, Drew, she becomes the manager of the boys' baseball team, where she quickly become attracted to and confused by the good-looking new coach, who's six years her senior. Over a period of months, she develops a clandestine relationship with the coach but starts to question whether kissing secretly in his truck is enough; she wants a real relationship with a guy who likes her for who she is, rather than for what she does for him physically. She also realizes that the other guys she's kissing may be misreading her intentions, that they too might want more from her than a one-night make-out session. Meanwhile, she's starting to have feelings for a boy she never thought of before, only to find that Drew, who's gay, likes him too. Set in the same high school as Catching Jordan (BCCB 2/12), Parker's story is nearly as compelling as Jordan's, with a similarly rich set of well-developed circumstances in a setting readers will surely recognize and relate to. Parker doesn't have a group of supportive girls surrounding her as Jordan did, but this opens the door for her to reunite with her mother, an important and necessary step in her self-understanding. Her guy friends are complexly and sympathetically drawn, and Parker's dilemmas will strike a chord with teen readers trying to sort out the dynamics of romantic relationships. Since that would be nearly all of them, this will have broad appeal among fans of realistic fiction.