Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles

by Sabine Durrant

Overview

Love, money, friendship . . . and incredibly uncomfortable underwear ? All these eternal mysteries are small challenges to Constance de Bellechasse. Too bad the glamorous inner persona of Constance comes through only as plain old Connie Pickles in everyday life.

Connie's first order of business: finding her mother a new husband. Connie enlists the help of her best friend, Julie, and before long everything spirals out of control. Boy-crazy Delilah begins fluttering around Connie's best guy friend, Will, and ever-reliable Will has been acting strangely awkward around Connie. But with a little luck and a lot of determination, Connie is sure that she can make everything right again in her world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061880711
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/17/2009
Series:	Connie Pickles , #1
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	474 KB
Age Range:	13 Years

About the Author

SABINE DURRANT is a former assistant editor of The Guardian and a former literary editor of the Sunday Times whose feature writing has appeared in numerous British national newspapers and magazines. She has been a magazine profile writer for the Sunday Telegraph and a contributor to The Guardian’s family section. She is the author of several books, including Under Your Skin, Lie With Me, and Finders, Keepers. She lives in south London with her husband, the writer Giles Smith, and their three children.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 6-9
Connie Pickles, 14, is a nerdy London girl who loves French culture and dreams of one day reuniting with her grandparents, the exotic de Bellechasses. Inspired by Nancy Mitford's The Blessing , Connie decides to help fix her widowed mother's bad luck with men and find her a suitable husband. After creating a list of qualities such as being financially stable, hunky, and a French buff, she and her best friend devise plans to con the unsuspecting suitors into meeting her mom. As disaster and hilarity become inevitable, Connie must figure out how to undo what has been done. Readers are sure to relate to the protagonist. Lonely, confused, and an outcast, she has to deal with issues of love, sex, puberty, honesty, and being a good friend. The climactic party at a friend's house, which involves heavy drinking, seems wild for this audience but Connie is always an observer with a mature outlook. She and Julie discuss the pressure of partying and how it is not for everyone. The book hits contemporary issues with a subplot that deals with Connie's feelings about a vague, ongoing overseas war. The diary format makes the text heartfelt and realistic. An enjoyable, lighthearted read.
—Jessica LamarreCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

In her journal, Connie Pickles chronicles seven weeks in her life, during which she sets her mother up with three different men, gets a job, quits a job, marches against the war, gets kissed, almost loses a friend and falls in love. Connie enlists the help of her best friend Julie to help find a boyfriend for her mother. They have three criteria: He must have money, have ties to France and be good with small children. However, even with this short list of requirements, eligible bachelors are scarce. Connie is so tied up in her schemes that she fails to notice the romance swirling around her. Her long-time friend, William, suddenly seems to be following her around. Her next-door neighbor, Delilah, is getting a reputation from all her partying and Julie has fallen in love. Connie is at once clever, funny and heartbreakingly real. Though at times a bit too familiar, Durrant manages to tell a fun and engaging story. (Fiction. 12-14)

Kirkus Reviews