![]() ![]() To celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Unfortunately, her parents have other plans. She wants to earn enough cash to buy a sporty mountain bike. See, her parents think her neon-pink bicycle is still perfectly fine, but Chloe knows that no self-respecting sixth grader worth her salt would be caught dead riding it. She knows exactly what she needs to do this summer: She has to- has to-put her nose to the grindstone and earn enough money for a new bike. Sometimes one’s priorities comes into crystal-clear focus, and for Chloe McCorkle, that time has arrived. Still, I’m glad there are books like Taryn Souders’ How to (Almost) Ruin Your Summer that can fetch them away to warm haunts even as the leaves start to fall. ![]() My children troupe back to school during high summer, and such an abbreviated break makes me a little sad. By the time Labor Day rolled around, I was ready to deal with pens and pencils, friends and fire alarms, hard-backed desks and barely remembered lessons. I remember wandering through an Ohio Valley August that burnt brown, the fields around my Lexington, Kentucky, home so blasted and brittle it was as if they’d been baked in an oven, the sky a shining sheet every bit as flat and hot as an industrial griddle. Summer seems sundered a little sooner each and every year. ![]()
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