Dawn

Brooks, Kevin. Dawn. New York: Scholastic, 2009.

Dawn lives an odd life.  She has no friends to speak of, wears old, shabby clothes, but has the largest television and computer set up of anyone in her class.  She helps her mom by cleaning the house and purchasing groceries, using money she finds in a duffel bag under a floorboard in her mom's room. And they never talk about where the money came from or why her dad left suddenly two years ago, until two of Dawn's "friends" from school come to her house, curious about her flat-screen TV.  Suddenly, it seems that Dawn's life could be in danger.

I admired Dawn's ability to stand up under all of the pressures she was dealing with, and also to handle school in spite of the memories of abuse she was trying to suppress. She and her mom had a wonderful, courageous, Custer-esque last stand at the end of the book.  The plot was pretty obvious, and the "friends" from school were so obviously not genuine, that I finished this book more to say I'd finished it than to actually discover that I was right about the ending.  Nonetheless, it was a good read, and a fast one.