Jo Ann Beard

In Zanesville Jo Ann Beard

The beguiling fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She is used to flying under the radar -- a sidekick, a third wheel, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent. Luckily, she has a best friend, a similarly undiscovered girl with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed, and character is forged. Intime, their friendship is tested: by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them as if they were found objects, and by the first, startling, subversive intimations of womanhood.