about the book
Until the last few months of her fifth grade year, Verbena Colter was happy. She lived a good life with her unusual but loving parents in the tiny Catskill town of Clydesdale. Though she has an uncool first name, is scrawny, sports almost white hair, lacks coordination, wears clunky glasses, and is a struggling student, she does fine. She even has a friend, Annie Bingham.
Verbena doesn’t realize she is a ticking time bomb. That she is living a lie. By the end of the
school year, her life blows up. It turns out that the Colters adopted her. Her real father is in prison for murder and her drunkard mother walked out immediately after Verbena’s birth, leaving Verbena on her own to cope with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
Now Verbena knows she is bad news. With real parents like hers, how could she be anything but trouble?. And Annie? Well, she’s not much of a friend anymore.
With her life spiraling downward, Verbena turns moody and mean. She argues with her seventy-year-old dad and says terrible things to her overweight mom. More than anything, Verbena wishes she could be someone else.
When Pooch and his mom rent the cottage next door for the summer, Verbena gets a chance to be that other person. Since the boy sees Verbena only at the lake where a girl downed long ago, he thinks she is the girl’s ghost!
It is all fun and games until it goes terribly wrong, and Pooch’s life ends up in jeopardy. Somehow, Verbena has to make everything right again.
about the author
Sarah Weeks had a problem when she was a kid. She loved music as much as she loved
books! Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a house filled with words, funny stories, and books, she ended up studying music composition at Hampshire College and graduate school at New York University.
Sarah became a singer and a songwriter. She moved to New York City, got married, and raised her two boys doing all the usual kid things, but in New York style (Little League in Central Park and pizza only by the slice). While taking the kids to games and birthday parties, Sarah started to write again.
The boys, Gabe and Nat, are now grown, and Sarah doesn’t have time for songwriting anymore—she has written more than fifty books!
Sarah splits her time between homes in Nyack and Callicoon County, New York. She teaches writing classes at the New School University, bakes, and talks daily on the phone with her mother who is in her 90s. Although her marriage ended in a divorce some time ago, she is now engaged to a “lovely” man, Jim Fyfe, and will soon have a new eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, Hailey, to share book ideas with!
Source:
Author website
Also by Sarah Weeks:
Honey. Scholastic. February 2015.
Pie. Scholastic. 2011.
Oggie Cooder, Party Animal (Oggie Cooder, Book 2). Scholastic. 2009.
Oggie Cooder (Oggie Cooder, Book 1). Scholastic. 2008.
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