Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action. The serious kiss comes in a wonderful final chapter containing a rare gift: a supremely satisfying last sentence. Dad’s alcoholism hits bottom and rehab ensues Libby’s tone shifts, thankfully, from an overdramatic annoyedness to an open realness. Far away from her old best friend (and co-conspirator in getting a “serious kiss” from a boy), Libby forms a new life in the tiny desert town. Lamenting that “everything awful happen to me,” Libby’s yanked out of her small town and moved to a Barstow trailer park (surprise: it’s a retirement home!) next door to an unknown woman (surprise: it’s her grandmother!).

Libby’s screwy family includes a mother more likely to say “dinneroo” than “dinner” and an older brother who hides cigarettes in his hair worse, no one sees her, her father’s an alcoholic, and family dysfunctions go unacknowledged. Fourteen-year-old Libby’s first-person narration of her trials and tribulations starts off gratingly but becomes likable two-thirds of the way through.

The Serious Kiss by Mary Hogan