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Babyface Kindle Edition
Toni and Julie were both born right after their parents moved in next to one another, and the two girls have hardly been separated since. Julie is tall and outspoken and stands up for herself, but really she’s just trying to survive until she turns eighteen so she can move out before her parents’ constant fighting drives her crazy. Meanwhile, Toni, small and shy, has the perfect family: no financial worries and two parents who obviously adore her. Compared to Julie, Toni knows she’s lucky.
But when Julie’s mom moves her family to San Francisco for the summer, Toni faces new challenges. Some changes are fun, like getting to know the cutest boy in school—but some, like discovering that maybe your family isn’t as perfect as you thought, aren’t quite so easy.
- Reading age12 - 17 years
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media Teen & Tween
- Publication dateMay 19, 2015
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
TONI HAD ALWAYS thought of herself as lucky. Toni Luck, she called it. She was lucky in her parents, lucky to have Julie. Those were the big things. But what about the little things, like the way Paws had come to her, just showed up at their house one day and stayed? Pure luck. Or how about the way she was always finding money in the street? Usually it was only a quarter or a dime, but once she had found a ten-dollar bill, and another time a silver dollar. Julie said Toni was probably the only kid in the world who could take a casual walk anywhere and pick up her allowance on the way.
Toni’s lucky feeling about herself was why she wasn’t even that surprised when a reporter from the Ridgewood Record wanted to write a story about her and Julie. Julie was the one who got excited. This could be important. What if a Hollywood producer sees my picture”
Julie, I really don’t think they read the Record in Hollywood,” Toni said.
But what if one did and saw me and thought, By Jove, that girl is photogenic and has talent!’”
Don’t think they say by Jove,’ either, Jul.”
Shut up, Toni.”
Whatever you say, Julie.”
The Ridgewood Record came out once a week with news and articles about people in their town. Small-town paper, only about eight pages and filled with ads, the features squeezed in between. How the paper happened to run the article about her and Julie was, Toni thought, like a Rube Goldberg contraption. The kind of thing where you press a button and a window flies open, which hits someone in the head, who falls down and knocks over a chair, which breaks a dish, which wakes the baby, who bites the dog.
The button in this case was Mrs. Abish, a widow who lived across the street at 92 Oak. One Sunday morning she got a yen for pancakes and noticed she didn’t have any maple syrup. She got on her three-speed bike and rode over to Paulsons’ Market, a mom-and-pop store on Poplar Avenue that was open from seven in the morning to midnight, seven days a week. Mr. Paulson happened to be in bed with a cold that day, so Mrs. Paulson was unusually busy, which was why she didn’t know someone had broken a bottle of syrup right at the end of aisle three. Which was why Mrs. Abish, coming around the corner, walked right into the sticky mess, slipped, and went flat on her back.
It must have been a glorious sight, me flailin’ around on the floor like a fat fish,” she said to anyone who would listen. Really she wasn’t fat so much as large, or what Toni’s mother kindly called well padded. Look at me. I used to be a slip of a girl. I’m this way from the grand food in this country,” Mrs. Abish would say. She had been born in Ireland and rolled her r’s wonderfully.
She came home from the hospital with her leg in a cast. It was the beginning of spring vacation for Julie and Toni, and they didn’t have that much to do, so they started going across the street to see if they could help Mrs. Abish, run to the store for her, or whatever. (Actually it had been Toni’s mother’s idea to begin with.)
Mrs. Abish was delighted. Is that you, loves?” she’d call when she heard their steps on the porch. Inside, she’d be sitting on the couch with her leg extended on a stool. Toni and Julie would sit down and talk to her for a while, then they’d dust or wash the dishes, whatever she wanted done. One day toward the end of va¬cation, when they went over, Mrs. Abish’s niece was visiting. Patricia Abish was a reporter, and Mrs. Abish had told her all about Julie and Toni. That was the beginning of the article. They were interviewed, they were photographed, everything very professional.
The day the story appeared, Julie read the article out loud, with appropriate gestures. In this day and age, when so many”arms spread widecherished”hand to heart traditions have disappeared”hand over eye, peering into the distanceand parents wonder . . .”
They spread the newspaper out on the floor and checked out the pictures. You can hardly see me,” Toni said. In every picture (there were three) she was looking down, looking away, or more or less hanging out behind Julie. Not great, but she wasn’t photogenic like Julie.
My lips are sticking out,” Julie said. Look at them, they poke out. Do they always stick out like that?”
Julie, your lips are beautiful. You’ve got full lips.”
Julie stared at herself in the mirror, front face, then at each profile. I might have to have my lips fixed. Some people get themselves full lips. I’ll get mine cut down.”
Julie, ugh! Sick. Don’t ever do anything like that.”
Oh, I couldn’t, anyway, it costs a huge amount of money. You have to be rich.”
Toni’s parents bought a dozen extra copies of the newspaper. Her mother clipped the article and sent it to everyone: to Toni’s sister, Martine, in New York City; to her uncle in Paris; to her grandmother in Los Angeles. Her father framed a copy for the family room. He laminated another copy and took it with him to the fire station. The last time he’d tacked an article on the bulletin board there had been three years ago when the Record had run a feature titled Men as Cooks.” They’d printed Toni’s father’s picture and his recipe for Pizza-in-a-Hurry.
For a while it seemed as if Toni couldn’t go anywhere in the neighborhood without someone saying, I saw your picture in the paper.” A kid she didn’t even know passed her and Julie on his bike and yelled, I read about you two!” Mrs. Frankowitz, who lived in the corner house, stopped Toni to say she’d had an article written about her once, too. I was even younger than you. I won a gymnastic competition,” she said, smiling, showing tiny gray teeth.
What made it all even more embarrassing was that Patricia Abish had gotten so many things wrong. For instance, Toni’s mother wasn’t manager of Rite Bargain Drugs, she was assistant manager. Julie’s father was a salesman, not a businessman. And Mrs. Jensen hadn’t even started her door-to-door cosmetics business until a year ago. Little details like that.
There were other things, too. She’d written that Toni and Julie’s parents were good friends, but really, it was more in the line of good neighbors who got together once or twice a year for a barbecue in the backyard. And Toni wished she only were slight. That sounded a lot better to her than skinny. Gaining weight was a big struggle. She had these elbows and kneespointy, bony things. Julie said she could always use them as weapons in hand-to-hand combat. Patricia Abish did get Julie right, tagging her as blond and blue-eyed, except that sounded so bland, so vanilla pudding. Exactly what Julie wasn’t.
What bugs me,” Julie said, is that I never said you and I were alike.”
I think she was being ironic, Jul,” Toni said.
Whatever,” Julie said. I could list a hundred differences. Starting with cats.” Julie tolerated Paws for Toni’s sake. But I don’t forget that he’s one of the sneaky tribe,” she always said. He’ll lick your hand, then go out and kill an innocent bird.”
It’s cat nature to hunt,” Toni said. They don’t do it to be cruel. They don’t have a concept of cruelty. That’s human beings.” Paws leaped up on Toni’s lap. He was always a little skittery around Julie, but Toni still kept trying to bring the two of them together.
Want to hold him, Jul?” She cuddled Paws. He was a small, cream-streaked-with-chocolate cat, some Siamese in his ancestry somewhere. When people play with pets, their heartbeat slows down and it calms them.”
My heartbeat can slow down when I get old, Toni.”
You’re missing a lot. A cat is a friend forever.”
Calling Hallmark Cards! Spare me the slop. I do not need a four-legged slimeball killer for a friend, Toni.”
Toni kissed Paws’s little heart-shaped face and whispered in his ear not to mind Julie. She was used to Julie’s harangues. It was part of the way they balanced each other: Toni was dark, Julie blond. Toni was slight, Julie not. Toni was shy, Julie outspoken. That really was their biggest difference.
Copyright © 1990 by Norma Fox Mazer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/ contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Product details
- ASIN : B00VH7BHCK
- Publisher : Open Road Media Teen & Tween (May 19, 2015)
- Publication date : May 19, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 1576 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 159 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,377,941 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
NORMA FOX MAZER is the award-winning author of many novels for young people. She has been honored with the Christopher Award, a Newbery Honor, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, and a National Book Award nomination. She and her husband, novelist Harry Mazer, divide their time between Jamesville, New York, and New York City.
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While Toni is there, Martine reveals a devastating secret about her parents’ past, and Toni, disillusioned, decides that the whole family has been living a lie that began before she was born. What is this shocking secret? How will it affect Toni and her relationship to her parents? And what will she do about it? Several references to smoking occur. Of course, smoking is an important factor in Harold’s heart attack, but Julie also takes it up supposedly in preparation for becoming an actress. Some typical public school boy-girl activities are mentioned, such as being in love and kissing, as Toni and Julie seem to vie for affection from the same boy, L. R. Faberman. There is actually a good story here that illustrates how to deal, or not deal as the case may be, with family skeletons in the closet, and with changes in friendships.
However, some parents may want to know that the “h” and “d” words are used somewhat liberally, along with some common childish slang terms for certain bodily functions and other near-vulgarisms. At the same time, when Toni writes Julie about her father’s heart attack, she asks Julie to pray for him. Some might wonder why the secret Toni learned was such a big deal, and readers may tend to be a bit hard on her attitude at first, but anyone can still relate to the resentment which it causes when she realizes that some aspects of her “perfect” life are not what she thought they were. The ending is hopeful, and everything finally works out as Toni deals openly and honestly with her issues so that she can start to accept and forgive. Author Norma Fox Mazer won a Newbery Honor Book award for her After the Rain.
This is a wise, nuanced little novel, full of richly drawn characters and deeply revealing subplots. Mazer handles Toni's transition from sheltered little girl to sensitive and aware young woman with grace and skill. Toni is a thoroughly likable and believable character, and her turmoil is genuine and poignant.
I will admit I didn't entirely understand why the secret Toni learned was such a big deal, but then again, she's more the protected innocent at the age of fourteen than I was at four. It's not the secret itself that makes such a difference in Toni's life as the understanding that some aspects of her "perfect" life are not what she thought they were. More problematic for me was the ending, which is hopeful, but rather too pat: all of a sudden in the last chapter everything works out all at once. Had the same resolution been brought about more gradually, it would have been much more believable and satisfying. That said, however, this is an enjoyable and mature novel that should have great appeal to young readers.
I would recommend this book to anyone who's going through a rough time with her parents being divorced or anyone who is interested in friendships. Julie, Toni's best friend, has a rough life with her parents being divorced; they argue all the time and Julie gets sick of it. For example, Julie went to Toni's house one night because her parents got into a huge argument. " They're at it again, Toni, I can't take it anymore!" Says Julie. Toni was very understanding. This book is very enjoying and I loved reading it. I honestly do not like to read, but this book caught my attention right away. As soon as I read the first two chapters I was already enjoying the book. So if you enjoy reading about friendships and your parents are divorced and you are having a rough time with them I encourage you to read this book!
This book was very short, in fact it's under 200 pages. I feel like maybe if I read this book when I was younger like 12-13 I probably would have enjoyed it more, but because of the fact that i've read so many more complex novels before this one, it feel short for me. Norma Fox Mazer was a favorite author of mine growing up and After The Rain, is one of those books that stick out in my mind that made me fall in love with reading from the beginning, and It won a number of awards to boot.
I think the younger audience would really enjoy this book, it's a light-hearted, summer read, that deals with issues that probably anyone could be able to relate too or have been through similar situations when they were younger. Norma Fox Mazer will continue to be an author I check out but this book was a little too basic and lacked complexity that i'm used too.