Both Feet on the Ground: Rules of the Road and Best Foot Forward by Joan Bauer

With a few rainy April weekends ahead before May flowers, this is a good time to spend a few hours with two crisp, funny stories of a teenaged girl whose feet are definitely on the ground and on the job--in, appropriately enough, a shoe store.

In Joan Bauer's first of these two YA novels, Rules of the Road, Jenna Boller is too tall (at five feet, eleven inches), not as beautiful as her sister Faith, not too happy with her alcoholic father, and not as good a student as she should be. What she is is a commonsensical girl with a love for retail--specifically Gladstone's Quality Shoes, where she gets a part-time job that she loves. Under the father-figure tutelage of Harry Bender, "the World's Best Shoe Salesman," Jenna finds something she enjoys and is really good at, good enough to get the attention of crusty old Madeline Gladstone, president and conscience of the company.

When Mrs. Gladstone hires Jenna, with her newly-minted license, to drive her on a round of visits to Gladstone stores, Jenna learns that her boss's ruthless son Eldon is trying a hostile takeover of the company to milk the family cash cow at the expense of its reputation. Madeline Gladstone loves her son but is determined to foil his plan and protect the business she also loves, and in Jenna she finds a kindred spirit. Two strong female figures, one just beginning her independent life and one nearer its end, come together in their love of great shoes, with wit and a bit of wisdom to boot, so to speak.

In the sequel, Best Foot Forward, Jenna has a support group, Al-Anon, where she confesses turning in her alcoholic father for drunk driving. She also has a bright red used car of her own and is again deeply enmeshed in the business of Gladstone Shoes. The merger with Shoe Warehouse of America, shepherded by Eldon Gladstone, sleazy shoe scion of the Gladstone family, has gone through, with Madeline Gladstone shunted aside as quality control czarina, and things at the store are not as comfy as a pair of Gladstone's should be.

Despite Jenna' doubts, Mrs. Gladstone hires a shoplifting teen boy in hopes of turning him around and appoints Jenna to be his mentor. If that isn't enough of a distraction, Shoe Warehouse starts installing blaring monitors which promote the bargain of the day, driving their best customers away. Then Jenna begins to notice some worrisome lapses in quality in the products she is selling, and some corporate sleuthing turns up a shadow corporation with a suspicious offshore Caribbean office and a sleazy sweatshop in Thailand which is producing cheap counterfeit shoes with the Gladstone label. Together Jenna and Mrs. Gladstone have their biggest corporate struggle ahead of them.

Things aren't all grim for Jenna, though, as she meets her possible soul mate and fellow donut lover. "He understands retail," Jenna dreamily reports. As a character who juggles her own crazy life, family problems, a corporate mystery, and a lot of laughs, Jenna Boller is as comfortable as a pair of quality Gladstone Walkers in these two solid young adult novels.