Hershey Herself (review)

With the aid of her friend Phoebe, Hershey has been trying to needle her mother's tempestuous live-in boyfriend into leaving. Her plans go nastily awry, however, when Slade instead beats Hershey's mother up, and Mom, Hershey, and Hershey's baby half-sister leave in a hurry for a woman's shelter. Once at the shelter, fourteenyear old Hershey finds her fellow shelter residents a surprisingly interesting bunch, and she even develops a secret pattern of music lessons with the hot-tempered Lupe, who's teaching Hershey to play the piano. Hershey's progress is so prodigious, in fact, that she decides to enter the town's big talent show, in the hopes that the cash prize will be enough for her mother to start anew and to convince her to resist the pull of her abusive boyfriend. It's unusual to see an abuse story that doesn't just end with departure for the shelter but actually follows the protagonist's life there, and Galante (who, according to a note, spent time in such a shelter) creates a well-drawn cast of residents with believable variety in their situations and their commitments to change. The book piles on too many plot threads, however, and plows through credibility in its determination to tie them all together; Hershey's sudden eruption of piano skills, for instance, is never believable, and the focus on a small-town talent show that will make or break the futures of the various entrants is pure soap opera. Hershey remains a sympathetic protagonist, though, and readers will be happy to see her finding better times.