Books with author Sarah Weeks

Verbena Colter knows she's bad news. Trouble from the get-go. How could she not be, with parents like hers? Her mother practically pickled her before she was even born, leaving Verbie to struggle with the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. And her father was just plain mean. Verbie wishes she could be somebody, anybody other than who she is. Enter Pooch, a flatlander boy visiting for the summer. When Pooch and his mom rent the house next door, Verbie takes the opportunity to be someone else entirely. And what starts out as a game leads Verbie into a surprising and heartwarming journey of self-discovery. Another gem from the author of So B. It.

Verbena Colter knows she's bad news. Trouble from the get-go. How could she not be, with parents like hers? Her mother practically pickled her before she was even born, leaving Verbie to struggle with the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. And her father was just plain mean. Verbie wishes she could be somebody, anybody other than who she is. Enter Pooch, a flatlander boy visiting for the summer. When Pooch and his mom rent the house next door, Verbie takes the opportunity to be someone else entirely. And what starts out as a game leads Verbie into a surprising and heartwarming journey of self-discovery. Another gem from the author of So B. It.

You couldn't really tell about Mama's brain just from looking at her, but it was obvious as soon as she spoke. She had a high voice, like a little girl's, and she only knew 23 words. I know this for a fact, because we kept a list of the things Mama said tacked to the inside of the kitchen cabinet. Most of the words were common ones, like good and more and hot, but there was one word only my mother said: soof. Although she lives an unconventional lifestyle with her mentally disabled mother and their doting neighbour, Bernadette, Heidi has a lucky streak that has a way of pointing her in the right direction. When a mysterious word in her mother's vocabulary begins to haunt her, Heidi's thirst for the truth leads her on a cross-country journey in search of the secrets of her past.

A Remarkable Journey of Self-Discovery Moving and funny, this heartwarming and memorable novel follows one girl's discovery that life is not always as simple as it seems. When Verbena Colter learns the truth about her birth parents — that her dad was a mean and sometimes dangerous person and her mother drank alcohol while she was pregnant — she feels scared and angry. Could it be that Verbie, too, is a terrible person on the inside? Just thinking about it makes Verbie wish she could be someone else entirely. So, when a nervous and allergic-to-almost-everything boy named Pooch becomes her neighbor for the summer and mistakes her for a ghost, Verbie doesn't correct him. Instead, she plays along, convincing him she's a girl who died in the neighborhood pond, and becoming his good (though ghostly) friend. But if Pooch likes Verbie as a ghost, what will he think of Verbie as a living girl? And will he help her discover the truth about the kind of person she is inside?

It's bad enough that thirteen-year-old Guy Strang's parents are getting divorced and his middle-aged mother is suddenly acting like a rebellious teenager. But to top that off Autumn Hockney asks him out to the movies. A year ago he would have known just what to say--"No!"--but for reasons that even he doesn't understand, he says "Maybe." That's when Guy's troubles begin. Everybody's mad at him. Autumn's larger-than-life best friend, Lana Zuckerman, will stop at nothing in her campaign to squeeze a definite "Yes" out of Guy, while Guy's best friend, Buzz, threatens to desert him forever if he goes soft. Guy can't afford to lose Buzz now, not when their brilliant plan to reunite his parent isn't going exactly as planned. In this sequel to her hilarious Regular Guy Sarah Weeks explored the very essence of early adolescence with sensitivity and her trademark sense of humor. Books for the Teen Age 2001 (NYPL)