Retaking Tara: Confederates Don't Wear Couture by Stephanie Kate Strohm

"Um, I have a boyfriend," I reminded Dev. No well-muscled man in uniform was going to change that.

"No, you don't," Dev replied breezily.

I rolled my eyes. "Dev, you've met him like fifteen times."

"Technically, you don't have a boyfriend," Dev explained. "According to the laws of Back to the Future, Garrett McCaffrey, your alleged boyfriend, doesn't even exist. Because he hasn't been born yet. And may never be born if we change the path of history as we know it.

"Back to the Future isn't real science. And we don't actually go back in time," I countered, eyeing him suspiciously. "You know this, right?"

"I'm just saying--what happens in 1861 stays in 1861."

It was a perfect prom with her BF Garrett, the nerdy but nice soul mate she met interning as a re-enactor in a restored Maine colonial village the previous summer, but prom is past and it's time for the history-obsessed and beauteous but brainy Libby to make some summer money before she and Garrett begin college together at Amherst. As usual her fashion-obsessed friend Dev has found a way to cash in on his dress designing talent as a sutler, a merchant camp follower for Civil War re-enactments across the Deep South.  Dev convinces Libby that with her to model his Scarlett O'Hara knockoffs, they'll rake in the neo-Confederate dollars and have a blast, with the added bonus of hanging around lots of cute Confederate hunks all summer. So while Garrett is off to intern at the Boston Globe Libby finds herself heading off to Sweet Home Alabama, hoop skirts and wasp-waisted corsetry at the ready.

All is not sunny down in Dixie, despite the undeniable charms of Beau Anderson, their exceedingly dashing guide and corporal in the re-enactor Confederate forces preparing for mock battle near Tuscaloosa.  Dev declares that he is near death when he learns that Confederates don't do coffee (there's that pesky coastal blockade between the Rebels and their caffeine supply), and Libby finds Southern belle undergarments give even her the vapors in the Deep South heat, but sales are booming on sutler's row, especially when the public sees what the petite Libby can do for Dev's well-crinolined antebellum gowns.

But Libby finds that she is still a magnet for faux ghosts, as a pale wraith is sighted, bewailing that a nineteenth-century curse is about to befall the last surviving Anderson man--who would, of course, be the buff and gallant Beau.  Libby suspects that the ghost's appearance is part of a land grab scheme by a mercenary builder who wants to turn Civil War battlefields into tracts of Tara knock-off condos, but the ghost is undeniably intimidating when it leaves behind messages predicting Beau's death scrawled in fresh chicken blood.

Meanwhile, the downright darlin' Beau seems to be enchanted by Libby's vintage charms. Given that Beau, unlike Garrett, shares her obsession for history, Libby also finds his courtly manners, soft Southern accent, and ways with a waltz almost irresistible.

The plot thickens like a pot of cold grits when the media gets hold of the historical ghost mystery, the news spreads all the way to Boston, and Garrett finds himself assigned as reporter for the Globe's Southern affiliate, the Tuscaloosa News, covering this historic ghost story.  Garrett is instantly jealous of Beau, who returns the favor, and Libby suddenly gains an understanding of Scarlett O'Hara's dithering between Ashley and Rhett.  It's a frothy romantic triangle and an admittedly vintage Scooby Doo ghost hunt to boot, as the re-enators roam the Southland all the way to the Carolinas before Libby and Garrett break the story, save the historic battlefields, and once more re-inact true love, in 1861 and in the present.

As with her first summer story, Pilgrims Don't Wear Pink, (see review here) Stephanie Kate Strohm's just-published  Confederates Don't Wear Couture (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) is a fizzy and funny summer frolic with a soupcon of Civil War history along the way, worthy of packing along for vacation fictional fare.

Historic Summer Romance: Pilgrims Don't Wear Pink by Stephanie Kate Strohm

"Please remind me again why you're going to pilgrim camp."

"Okay, first it's not camp. It's a living history museum studies internship." I nestled my cell phone between my ear and my shoulder, trying to zip my suitcase closed with one hand. Definitely not working. "And second, Ugh," I grunted. That zipper was like beyond stuck. "Like I've told you about a million times, I'm not a pilgrim." I sat on the suitcase. "I'm an eighteenth-century New England colonist on the coastline of the territory now known as the state of Maine. It's a totally different thing. It's like mistaking Pucci for Gucci."

"Sorry, Libs," said Dev, "but you know my brain shuts down when you go all History Channel on me."

Libby's friend Dev can't understand why she's not interning at Teen Mode with him in Manhattan, but Libby loves history and eighteenth-century romantic writers like Jane Austen. To Dev "living history is an oxymoron." But to Libby it's her best chance to live an a romantic era, immersing herself in 1790, and to wear some really cool kirtles and curve-defining stays. A Colonial Cinderella!

But the details are not so Disney. She is stuffed into cramped quarters with the mousy Suze and the arrogant Ashling, who insists on staying in character as the prudish Susannah Fennyweather 24/7 and sneers at the magnitude of Libby's off-duty wardrobe. The Living Museum itself is having financial woes, with such declining attendance that this may be their last season. And then there's the colonial makeup code:

"No makeup?" I stuttered. "Um, I don't mean to be a pain in the butt about this, but I'm blond--"

"We are well aware," Ashling deadpanned.

"I look really weird without eye makeup. Like an alien. Because I have blond eyelashes. I might scare the kids..." I trailed off.

"As a redhead, I am familiar with the phenomenon," Maddie said dryly. "We appreciate your sacrifice. But no makeup."

But Camden Town has its compensations. Libby loves her job with the Girls of Long Ago Camp and soon proves that she can turn out a mean gingerbread baked in the ashes with the best of them. And then--there are the squaddies--buff, tanned teen boys who man the facsimile ships in the harbor. And when these sailors are in port, as Libby notes, it's like an explosion of Harlequin historical romance cover models. And one of the demo squaddies, the totally hot Cam, soon comes calling, sending her little girl campers into a romantic tizzy. Cam quotes sonnets, brings daily bouquets, and invites her to go sailing and dancing at the first holiday clambake. They're potentially the perfect colonial couple, Libby thinks.

Enter Garrett, the nerdy sci-fi nut, whose idea of style is a three-decade old Starship Enterprise tee, the cub reporter for the Camden Crier, assigned to stake out the good ship Lettie Mae in hopes of photographing the ghost reportedly seen there. Libbie sees an opening to escape her totally annoying roommate Ashling and find space for her shoe collection and volunteers to be the requisite intern who monitors Garrett's stay aboard the boat. Libby finds Garrett impossibly dorky, with his Hobbit-hairy toes, his open disdain for the hunky Cam, and his vintage Star Trek wardrobe, but it's worth it, especially since her cell phone gets really good service out in the harbor. Now if she can just entice Cam to do a Mr. Darcy to her Elizabeth Bennett, Libby's summer will be a historical romance in and of itself!

But, as literarily noted, the course of true love never does run smooth, and Libby soon finds that although she can hack the historic part of the summer, the romance part is not what it is cracked up to be:

"I can't believe I fell for that idiot." I shook my head.

"Oh, I can," Garrett said grimly. "Let me guess.... he quoted some Shakespeare at you, brought you flowers, and swept you off your feet with all the romantic bullshit you always dreamed of but were afraid existed only in books?"

"Um, yeah. Pretty much exactly," I admitted.

But as Shakespeare himself notably said, "All's well that ends well," and this sweet and spicy tale does work out that way in Stephanie Kate Strohm's forthcoming Pilgrims Don't Wear Pink (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), a light and witty summer romance yarn with a spunky heroine who packs her cell phone in her bodice but leaves her common sense back home pro tem as she temporarily falls for the charming cad. It's an old premise, but one in which Strohm's snappy dialogue and timely twists of plot takes the reader along merrily in this historical romantic romp.

The Honeymoon's Over: Jessica Rules the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

No, the vampire concepts of history, legacy, and birthright didn't hit home until I saw that heritage measured out in stakes.

"Lucius, that is..." Amazing? Unbelievable? Disgusting?

The room was small, but what that chamber lacked in size, it made up for in weaponry. Almost every square inch of wall held a bracket that in turn held a stake, point down, so that the entire room looked like the upper jaw of a great white shark. I felt like I was being eaten alive.

I'm in a museum of destruction.

Lucius stood still and silent, allowing me to explore. So much history--and so much old blood.

And then...my eye was caught by another familiar name, next to the only stake encased in glass.

I turned to Lucius, baffled. "Why is Raniero's stake here? He's alive. He was your best man."

It's hard times in Transylvania. Anastasia (nee Jessica Packwood) has married her vampire prince and is now embedded in an icy castle in the middle of the gloomy, snowy Carpathian mountains, surrounded by spies, conspiracies, double-agent cousins, and more blood than even a newly-bitten vampire princess wants to see...ever!

No sooner does Jessica get settled in as co-ruler of the vampire kingdom than her cool but hot husband Lucius Vladescu finds himself accused of the grisly murder (by stake, natch) of his uncle Claudiu. Nobody at court actually misses Claudiu, mind you, a duplicitous Draculian scoundrel, it seems, but still, that's Lucius' own stake still wet with the victim's blood, and Claudiu's murder must be avenged by destruction of the offending vampire under law.

With her Lucius in the dungeon and no other vampire claimants to the throne at hand, Jessica has to become the ruler and call for the trial of her own husband, confined in a subterranean cell without a bit of blood to drink to keep him sane. Her look-alike cousin Ylenia seems to be auditioning for the job as her new BFF, but the fortifying vintage blood she brings the princess to drink tastes suspiciously evil, even to a relatively new vampire. Being a Mathlete and a recent graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School hasn't prepared Jessica for any of this.

So Jessica does what any vampire princess new to a difficult job would do--she calls up her real BFF Mindy Sue on her pink Motorola and begs her to come over for winter break. Mindy arrives with everything necessary to rescue a vampire princess--dozens of shoes, her rolling carry-on of cosmetics and hairstyling gear, a supply of TastyCakes, and a lifetime of wisdom garnered from reading Cosmo. Whew! Things are in good hands at last. Now the reader can relax!

But hard behind Mindy Sue comes her old boyfriend Raniero Vladescu, sometimes Buddhist surfer/slacker dude, onetime vampire assassin, Lucius' cousin and a potential pretender to the throne. Lucius trusts him, but Jessica is not so sure, and Mindy is on the horns of the dilemma, too. Is Raniero her ex or not? After all, he never offered to bite her, like Lucius did for Jessica, and how's a girl to know if it's true love without that immortality-granting big hickey? Not to mention that he confesses that he already lost his first bite virginity to the sneaky Ylenia. Was it love at first bite, or just a one=night nibble? Mindy, with her chick-lit education, rightfully suspects Ylenia as having her hopes set on making Raniero king and becoming his consort queen in the Vladescu dynasty.

It's a Gothic vampire mystery slash teen love triangle tale that makes the Twilight saga, with its straightforward rogue vampires and werewolves, seem simplistic. Will Jessica finally take up the reins of royalty and really reign over this bunch of unlikable fanged backbiters? The, er, stakes are high in this Draculian saga of happy-ever-after princessville.

Beth Fantaskey's long awaited sequel to the frankly funny (if fangful) first book, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, her forthcoming Jessica Rules the Dark Side (Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, 2012), lacks the fang-in-cheek humor of that book's juxtaposition of vampire culture with high school mores, and the grim, however fantastical, situation now facing our heroine drives out much of the wit whenever Jessica and Lucius are on-page. However, Mindy Sue flies in to save the day, bringing a humorous ironical voice to the narrative along with her reticule of coiffure and shoe possibilities, while her hot and cold romance with hottie "Ronnie" (a.k.a. Raniero Vladescu) provides the heat that keeps the reader going through the myriad candlelit crypts, secret subterranean passages, midnight grave-robbing forays, assorted bloody stakes, and the worst in-laws in the history of royal romance. (Sorry, Cinderella!)

If only Princess Diana had had a Mindy Sue on her side!

Summer Loves: Thirteen Plus One by Lauren Myracle

The thing about BIRTHDAYS, at least fourteenth birthdays is that they're more...well...complex than every single birthday that came before. Or maybe the only reason I thought so was because I just this very day turned fourteen. Me me me me me me! Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen, fourteen!!!!

Fourteen years and counting, baby. That was a lot of birthdays!

Winnie Perry feels different, even though there are still three months left of junior high. High school looms ahead, scary, yes, but a long-sought milestone of maturity, and suddenly Winnie feels the importance, if not exactly the weight, of her years. Suddenly things seem more poignant, more significant, and Winnie is compelled to compose one of her famous lists for the last few days before she enters high school:

TO DO BEFORE HIGH SCHOOL

SAY OUT LOUD WHAT I WANT OUT OF LIFE

BE SPAZZY

BUT ALSO PRACTICE BEING OLDER SOMEHOW

DO SOMETHING TO HELP THE WORLD (LIKE THAT THREE CUPS OF TEA GUY)

BECOME FRIENDS WITH SOMEONE NEW

TAKE CHARGE WITH LARS!

DO SOMETHING SCARY,

But Winnie flubs her new rules on the very day of her birthday. She just knows her ninth-grade boyfriend is going to know what she really wants--for him to present her with a darling cupcake with a pink candle, followed by a sweet kiss, in full view of everyone in her cafeteria. But he fails the best boyfriend test big time, nonchalantly handing her a Starbucks Gift Card after school. Somehow Winnie is disappointed. Logically she knows he can't read her mind, but selfishly, she can't help believing he should have picked up on the hints she slipped to him before the big day.

Things seem to going downhill with Lars from there on. And when Lars announces that he's going to be away with his mom, who is studying in Germany, for the whole summer, Winnie somehow feels that she needs to get even, and when shy Dinah gets caught hiding weird Mary's shoplifted stash in her locker and her father declares that she has to attend a "leadership" camp most of the summer, Winnie decides to go along and books them into an ecological beach camp, helping sea turtle hatchlings. Cinnamon, her temporarily boy-hating other best friend, also finally agrees to come along at the last moment and the three BFFs are headed off for the sand and sun of South Carolina.

There the friends deal with living with other teens--including some really great boys and a couple of, well, different girls--in a big old house on the coast, where they get much more than killer tans out of the experience. Dinah finds her first boyfriend, shy and sweet like herself, and Cinnamon suddenly gets over the trauma of being dumped by Bryce midyear and falls for the lanky James. Winnie is torn, flirting with the hunky and somewhat overbearing Alphonse, and worrying about her relationship with Lars which is also in the swamp for the summer.

The three friends all find themselves growing through the new experiences in understanding and self confidence, and in the latest for the New York Times best-selling Lauren Myracle's Thirteen Plus One (The Winnie Years) (Dutton, 2010), she continues her solid but light-as-cupcake frosting tales of Winnie. Winnie is a wonderful character, developed in a series of books centered around her eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and now fourteenth birthdays. As with Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's excellent Alice series, young teens could do worse than grow up as best friend of the honest, funny, and basically decent Winnie Perry.

Love Story: The Juliet Club by Suzanne Harper

"In fair Verona, where we lay our scene . . . "

Kate Sanderson is a sensible girl, so she doesn't think much of it when she boards a plane to one of the most romantic cities in the world for a summer Shakespeare seminar on Romeo and Juliet in Verona. Determined to immerse herself in the rich Italian culture (and pasta and gelato, of course), Kate finds love is the last thing on her practical mind when she meets Giacomo, the handsome, dark-eyed son of her father's academic rival, Professoressa Marchese.

Tracking the plot line of Much Ado About Nothing, Juliet's new friends scheme to bring her and Giacomo together in a summer romance, and spying out their plan, Juliet and Giacomo in turn agree to flirt openly and pretend to become totally smitten with each other. But when the two of them become entwined in a real whirlwind romance, Kate finds herself experiencing real feelings for the gorgeous and charming Italian heart breaker, finding herself as deeply immersed in romance as the real Juliet.

Determined to make the most of their short time together, the couple people-watch in the plaza, sipping lemonade, and share secret kisses under the warm sun with all the Mediterranean delights of the Continent, culminating in their last night together, starring as Romeo and Juliet in their class production of that timeless romance.

A classic romance abroad with enough romantic twists borrowed from several of the Bard's dramas to satisfy the most love-obsessed teen-aged girl, The Juliet Club (HarperCollins, 2010) moonlights as a light read with literary merit deftly concealed by Suzanne Harper's sly borrowings from the Bard. The author even adds a bit of personal insight into the essence of real love in the class's assignment to answer letters from real lovelorn teens as "Juliet" of the Juliet Club, a sort of Italian "Dear Abby" column. The author also colors her storytelling with plenty of historical and cultural details of the setting in Verona, adding a degree of depth not seen in most young adult romance novels.

Harper cut her literary teeth on three spin off novels based on the popular Hannah Montana show (Rock the Waves (Hannah Montana), Hannah Montana: In the Loop, and Swept Up (Hannah Montana), and her highly reviewed young adult novel The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney. Witty storytelling, believable teen characters, and enough Shakespearean subplots to satisfy even an English teacher, this one belongs on any girl's summer reading list.


[Welcome back to my favorite teen reviewer, Julia Teal, back from her own summer seminar, with a review of a fictional counterpart who signed up for no more than a college credit course abroad and found more than she expected.]