"Love and Muddy Puddles", a novel by Cecily Paterson

I remember well the yearnings of my adolescent heart towards enduring popularity.  I remember hanging around the edges of different groups of girls at school desperately hoping to be noticed and accepted.  

I remember with a pang the pain of being dropped from a group that I had been on the edge of for a year or so...the agony of betrayal by a one-time best friend who had to drop me too...for the sake of the group.

It is a rare book that can reach out of it's target demographic and thrust the reader kicking and screaming back into their own painful adolescence. "Love and Muddy Puddles" (LAMP)is such a book.  A book aimed squarely at the Young Adult niche, LAMP took me back to my days of desperation, longing, hoping, disappointment... days of wanting to be popular,wanting to be looked up to, wanting to be recognised for my wit and charm...rather than my shrimpiness and not-pretty-enough-ness... It was in some ways an uncomfortable read because I could see myself in Coco...the maddening always-right-ness of youth... the dismissal of the road less travelled... the certainty of ones' superiority... 

Paterson has the knack of creating true to life characters with believable story-arcs... in some ways LAMP is a tragedy with redemption... in other ways it is the comeuppance of the bitch.  
Either way, Coco is not your run-of-the-mill heroine. She is flawed. But capable of growth and change... it is an existential journey... one that all adolescents will undertake... 

LAMP is a book that your teenaged female reader will like... an astute reader will enjoy LAMP for the generous nods to Austen... and those alone will be a good reason for me to re-read it!