STORER, Jen Quincy Jordan Puffin (Crystal Bay Girls #1), 2014 234pp $16.99 pbk ISBN 9780143307594 SCIS 1649004
Quincy Jordan is in Year 8 at a private girls’ school in the city: she wants to be a doctor like her father, she loves fashion, and her best friend is Jules. We meet Quincy on a bad day, one that starts with a hockey incident, and ends with her father declaring that he is leaving her mother for another woman. Quincy’s life is turned upside down. This light and breezy novel focuses on Quincy’s move to the Byron Bay-esque town of Crystal Bay, where she and her mother reconnect with her aunt’s family, who live an arty, laid back existence. Of course, romance ensues and Quincy has a few epiphanies about life during her stay. The exploration of parental separation is played fairly gently, as is the teen romance. The narrative voice is sweet, at times witty, and the novel will be a pleasant and undemanding distraction for lower secondary readers.
reviewed by Angie Holst