Lucy Unstrung

LUCY UNSTRUNG is great middle grade fiction about a young girl TRYING to get her very young mother to grow up. Lucy’s mother was just a teen when she gave birth. At thirteen, Lucy is a sensible, almost rigid thirteen year-old trying to keep her life together (and her mother’s desire to relive her lost teenage years in check), learning all the while that there are problems she must come to terms with and solve for herself.Teens who get pregnant and raise their babies are often in the news. But what about those children who are growing up with parents scarcely half a generation older than themselves?In this wise and funny first novel by Carole Lazar, Lucy is a sensible, perhaps even rigid, thirteen year old who is convinced that Grandma, God, and the Catholic Church are on her side. She tries hard to make her twenty-eight-year-old mother see the error of her ways. It’s not that her mother is wild - in their household even a fancy coffee causes a scene - but she has had to put off her own teenage years and she’s chaffing at the restraints on her life. Lucy is faced with the loss of her family, her home, her school, and even her best friend. As she struggles to preserve what she can from her past life, she finds that while Grandma, God, and her church are still there for her, there are problems she has to solve for herself.