Sometimes it's fun to re-read books you read when they were new and see how they stack up. Sometimes these books are still great. Sometimes.... Well, sometimes they lose something in the re-read, whether they're no longer timely or they're just not as good as you thought they were.
Fortunately, Ten Miles Past Normal, by Frances O'Roark Dowell (originally published 2011) is pretty much just as great as the first time I read it.
Ten Miles Past Normal stars high school freshman Janie Gorman, a former suburban kid whose parents moved to the country to try their hand at goat farming (it's a long story). Janie wants nothing more than to blend in with the rest of her classmates. Not be Miss Popularity. Just... blend in. Something that's hard to do when you sometimes come to school with goat poop on your shoe or hay in your hair (OK, so these things don't happen every day, but their single occurrences live in infamy in the hallowed high school halls). To complicate things, Janie's friend group got split up and she and her BFF Sara have been growing apart.
Ten Miles Past Normal begins with Janie acting very uptight and restrictive about all things that could cause her to stand out any more than she already does: Refusing to try new things, not wanting to associate with people who could be considered "weird" or "different"... that sort of thing. She's absolutely humiliated by her family. In particular, her mother, who has a popular blog about life down on the farm. Actually, Janie is a bit of a brat when we, the reader, first meet her. And I really didn't like her much.
Gradually, though, Janie begins to loosen up. She makes friends with Verbena and Monster, two students who are just the sort of people she would have avoided at first. She joins the school's Jam Band as the sole female bass player. She even starts to be OK with farm life. And when the story finishes, Janie has become a really awesome character.
No more spoilers, though.
I first read Ten Miles Past Normal when it was first published. It was a book I checked out solely based on the awesome cover and ended up loving. And I was so happy to discover the book was just as great the second go-around...almost 10 years later. The plot development and the character growth are handled so well. It's a great coming-of-age story. There were a couple bits that gave me pause (the "Just Say No" moment felt really random and forced and After School Special, and it didn't at all fit with the story), but otherwise it was pretty much the perfect book.
--AJB
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