Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

by Deb Caletti Narrated by Amanda Ronconi

Overview

A summer romance headed for heartbreak turns into a mother-daughter road trip in the name of true love in this story of love, loss, and redemption from Printz Honor medal winner and National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti.

It is summer in the northwest town of Nine Mile Falls, and Ruby McQueen-ordinarily dubbed The Quiet Girl-finds herself hanging out with gorgeous, rich, thrill-seeking Travis Becker. With Travis, Ruby can be someone she's never been before: Fearless. Powerful. But Ruby is in over her head, risking more and more when she's with him.

In an effort to keep Ruby occupied and mend her own broken heart, her mother, Ann, drags Ruby to the weekly book club she runs for seniors. At first, Ruby can't imagine a more boring way to spend an afternoon, but she is soon charmed by the women she's spending time with. And when the group discovers one of their own members is the subject of the tragic love story they are reading, Ann and Ruby ditch their respective obsessions to spearhead a reunion between the long-ago lovers. They're in search of a happy ending...but for who?

This lyrical, multigenerational story of love, loss, and redemption speaks to everyone who has ever been in love-and lived to tell the tale.

Editorial Reviews

Shy high schooler Ruby McQueen earned the nickname Quiet Girl. But that was before she began hanging out with good-looking, rich, thrill-seeking Travis Becker. Perfectly modulated; seductively plausible.

Publishers Weekly

Ultimately rewarding, this novel about a high school girl who steps out of her role as "The Quiet Girl" for a summer of "passion and adventure... the stuff of the books at the Nine Mile Library where my mother works," shares both the strengths and pitfalls of Caletti's The Queen of Everything. When Ruby gets involved with handsome, motorcycle-riding and rich Travis, she likes that he sees her as fearless. But he is also dangerous, and spellbound Ruby gradually gets sucked into first reckless and then criminal acts. In a concerted effort to help Ruby break away from Travis, her librarian mother, who has just endured a betrayal of her own, begins overseeing Ruby's schedule and takes her to the book club she facilitates for feisty senior citizens, the Casserole Queens-which leads to a whole other story line involving one of their members, a stroke victim who may or may not have been the lover of a famous author. There is a lot of plot, often requiring the audience's leaps of faith over not especially believable moments, and Caletti's prose, laden with strikingly apt comparisons, can make this book feel dense. Even so, so much here is uncommonly vivid, especially the exchanges among Ruby, her mother and her younger brother. Readers who stay with it will find thoughtful and authentically inspiring messages about trusting in themselves enough to insist on a love that means more than being someone's "honey, baby, sweetheart." Ages 12-up. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up-During the summer of her junior year, shy, quiet Ruby McQueen falls in love with the rich boy down the block. After their first motorcycle ride, Travis gives her a beautiful gold chain, and she wears it everywhere. Only later, while on a date with him, does she learn where he gets his gifts-he breaks into houses and steals jewelry. Ruby struggles with her conflicted feelings for him. Her parents are separated and hardly stellar examples when it comes to relationships. By spending time with the Casserole Queens (her librarian mother's senior-citizen book group) and listening to their life stories, the teen and her mother finally discover the role models that they've been lacking. Readers will immediately fall for Ruby with her humor and her wry way of looking at the world. Their hearts will break as she makes bad decision after bad decision, and they'll cheer as she comes to some important realizations, with the help of the Casserole Queens. Young adults will see themselves in Ruby and, like her, have some laughs along the road to wisdom. A story full of heart, fun, and energy.-Lynn Evarts, Sauk Prairie High School, Prairie du Sac, WI Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Tender and poetic, Caletti's tale of the multifaceted effects of the many kinds of love tells the story of Ruby, who, in an effort to break out of her quiet-girl persona, begins dating an exciting but amoral rich boy. To bring Ruby back into the fold, her divorced librarian mother gets her involved in a reading group for the aged. One of the members of the book club, an elderly woman recently debilitated by a stroke, turns out to be the real-life love of an author whose book they are studying. In the least inspired part of the tale, the crowd decides to kidnap the incapacitated lady from her controlling daughters and bring the lovers together. Caletti has the gift of voice and tells her story with humor, insight, and compassion. Listen to Ruby musing on the delicate balance of kindness and truth between mother and daughter. "We cared too much for each other to have between us the recklessness of complete honesty." Lovely. (Fiction. 12+)

From the Publisher

"Readers will immediately fall for Ruby with her humor and her wry way of looking at the world.... A story full of heart, fun, and energy." — School Library Journal, starred review

"Caletti explores the conflicting, complicated impulses of the human heart with polish and penetration." — The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"Caletti has the gift of voice and tells her story with humor, insight, and compassion." — Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169526509
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	05/20/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	10 - 13 Years

Read an Excerpt

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

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By Deb Caletti

Simon & Schuster

Copyright © 2004 Deb Caletti
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-689-86765-4

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Chapter One

The first thing I learned about Travis Becker was that he parked his motorcycle on the front lawn. You could see the tracks of it all the way up that rolling hill, cutting deeply into the beautiful, golf course-like grass. That should have told me all I needed to know, right there.

I'm not usually a reckless person. What happened the summer of my junior year was not about recklessness. It was about the way a moment, a single moment, could change things and make you decide to try to be someone different. I'm sure I made that decision the very moment I saw that metal, the glint of it in the sun, looking hot to the touch, looking like an invitation. Charles Whitney - he too made a decision like that, way back on August 14, 1945, just as he ground a cigarette into the street with the toe of his shoe, and so did my mother when she decided that we had to steal Lillian.

Reckless is the last thing you'd call me. Shy is the usual word. I'm one of those people doomed to be known by a single, dominant feature. You know the people I mean - the Fat Girl, the Tall Guy, the Brain. I'm The Quiet Girl. I even heard someone say it a few years ago, as I sat in a bathroom stall. "Do you know Ruby McQueen?" someone said. I think it was Wendy Craig, whose ankles I had just whacked with too much pleasure during floor hockey. And then came the answer: "Oh, is she That Quiet Girl?"

I blame my quiet status on two embarrassing incidents, although my mother will say that I've always just been a watchful person by nature, doing my own anthropological study of the human race, like Jane Goodall and The Chimpanzees of Gombe. She is probably right that personality plays a part. I sometimes feel less hardy and cut out for the world than the people around me, too sensitive, the kind of person whose heart goes out to inanimate objects - the sock without a partner, a field of snow interrupted by footprints, the lone berry on a branch. But it is also true that humiliating experiences can wither your confidence sure as salt on a slug.

I was reasonably outgoing in the fifth grade, before I slipped on some glossy advertising circulars in our garage, broke my tailbone, and had to bring an inflatable doughnut to sit on at school. Before this I would actually raise my hand, stand at the front of a line, not be afraid to be noticed. My stomach seizes up into knots of humiliation just remembering that doughnut. It looks like a toilet seat, Brian Holmes cracked, and the above mentioned Wendy Craig laughed. And he was right; it did - like those puffy ones that you see in tacky, overdecorated bathrooms.

I had begun to put it all behind me, pardon the pun. I'd nearly erased the memory of Mark Cummings and Dede Potter playing Frisbee with the doughnut during lunch, trying instead to remember what my mother told me, that Brian Holmes would no doubt end up prematurely bald and teaching remedial math, and that Mark Cummings was gay, only he didn't know it yet. Then it happened again: humiliating experience, part two. Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water. This time it was my own fault. I'd placed a pair of minipads in the armpits of my blouse so I wouldn't soak my underarms with nervous sweat during a science speech, and one sailed out as I motioned to my display board. At home, peeling the paper strips and sticking the pads in my shirt had seemed ingenious. Why had no one thought of this before? But as soon as I started to speak, I could feel the right one loosen and slip with every small gesture. I tried to keep my arm clutched tight to my side, soldierlike. Just because an organism is one-celled, doesn't mean it is dull and uninteresting. Finally, I had no choice but to flip the page of my board, and down the minipad shot like a toboggan on an icy slope, landing on the floor in white, feminine-hygiene victory. The crowds roared.

So I became quiet. This seemed the safe thing to do when embarrassments hunted me like a stalker hunts a former lover. Again my mother tried her wisdom on me - Laugh it off, she said. Everyone else is too busy trying to forget their own humiliations to remember yours. You're no different than anyone else. Why do you think that years later we still have dreams that we went to school and forgot to get dressed? And again, this might be true. Still, it seems to me that if I get a pimple it will be in the middle of my forehead like an Indian bindi, and if the answer is spermatozoa, I'm the one that will be called on. I've just found that it's best to lie low.

Quiet People, I can tell you, usually have friends who play the violin way, way too well, and know that continental drift isn't another way you can get your coffee at Starbucks. My friend Karen Jen won the Youth Math Extravaganza (I noticed that the bold letters on the sweatshirt she got spelled Y ME, but I didn't mention this to her), and Sarah Elliott and I became friends in P.E. because the V-sit was the highlight of our gymnastics ability. Last winter, Sarah made a wild pass of her basketball and whacked Ms. Thronson of Girl's State Volleyball Championship fame on the back of the head. One minute there was Ms. Thronson, her shoulders as big as the back of a dump truck, blowing her whistle - Threeep! And the next minute, bam, she was down on her knees as if praying for forgiveness for making us do that unit on wrestling. Sometimes you don't know your own strength.

If you are kind, or were one of my friends in the pre-doughnut days, you've cringed for me over the years, sending supportive thoughts with a glance. But maybe, just maybe, when it is my turn to read aloud in English class (because reading aloud means that Mrs. Forrester can grade papers rather than really teach), you also notice that my voice is clearer and stronger than you thought it would be. When I read Fitzgerald, when I read the part about the light at the end of Gatsby's dock, you see that Mrs. Forrester puts down her red pen and pauses with her coffee cup halfway to her lips, her eyebrows knitted slightly in a look of the softest concentration. That's when you wonder if there might be more to me. More than the glimpse of my coat flying out behind me as I escape out the school doors toward home. At least that's what I hope you think. Maybe you're just thinking about what you're going to have for lunch.

Old Anna Bee, one of the Casserole Queens, told me the same thing once, that there was more to me. She took one finger, knobby from years of gardening, and tapped my temple, looking me long in the eyes when she said it so that I would be sure to take in her meaning. I liked the way it sounded - as if I lead a life of passion and adventure, the stuff of a good book of fiction, just no one knows it. It sounded like I have secret depths.

And I guess for one summer, just one summer, maybe it was true. I did have passion and adventure in my life, the stuff of the books at the Nine Mile Falls Library where my mother works. Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months you're not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don't have the rest of the year. You can be graceful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out.

It was nearly summer, though school wasn't let out yet, when I got that brief glimpse of Travis Becker's motorcycle on the long lawn of the Becker estate. I had walked home by myself that day, instead of with my friend Sydney, as I usually do. Sydney has lived next door to me forever; we both have movies of us when we were babies, sitting in one of those blow-up wading pools, screaming our heads off.

"We're only screaming because of those bathing suits you guys had us in. They look like the kind you see at the community pool on the old ladies recovering from heart surgery. They've got skirts, for God's sake," Sydney said one night as we all watched the movies at her house.

"You were babies. The old ladies, by the way, only require heart surgery after seeing what girls wear to the beach these days," my mother said.

"Personally, I think Sydney started screaming then and just never stopped," her mother, Lizbeth, said, dodging a few popcorn pieces Sydney threw her way.

Lizbeth was probably right. Sydney was one of those people who weren't afraid to express themselves, through words, through clothes, through honking a horn at another car during her Driver's Ed test. She once got grounded for grabbing the family goldfish out of the bowl and threatening to throw it at her brother during an argument. Sydney and her whole family, really, were the kind of people who made you feel that power was possible if you could only get to the point where you didn't care what anyone thought. Sydney was a year older than I was, and my only friend who didn't know more about algorithms than was actually good for the health. She was more like family, though.

"You are a cool and beautiful person," she had said to me after the minipad incident. "Just remember that high school is a big game where the blond, perfect ones sit on the sideline while everyone else crosses a mine field trying not to look stupid. In the real world, this all reverses." She sounded a bit like my mother. "Being blond and perfect prepares you for nothing in life but being married to a brain-damaged former football jock named Chuck and having a license plate holder that says FOXY CHICK." Next year when Sydney went off to college, I would miss her more than I could say.

But that day, fate sent Sydney to the dentist, and I walked home on my own. I got to go the way I liked: the long way. After you get out of school and pass the Front Street Market and the used bookstore and the community theater where they put on plays that usually star Clive Weaver, our postman, you can go home two ways. Sydney's way, the quickest on foot, is down a side street, cutting through Olsen's Llama Farm and the property of Johnson's Nursery. But I like to take the main road, Cummings Road, the same one we take in the mornings when Mom drives my brother and me to school on her way to work. Nine Mile Falls sits in the center of three mountains, and Cummings Road weaves through the valley of the largest one, Mount Solitude.

When you walk, you can look at it all more closely - the winding streets named after trees that lead to snug neighborhoods; the small houses that sit right on the road near town, with their lattice arbors and gardens packed tight with old roses. If you go far enough, you walk past the sprawling lawn of George Washington's house, at least that's our name for it, the huge colonial that is odd and unexpected in our Northwest town, as odd and unexpected as finding a decent car at Ron's Auto, the place you pass next. Ron's Auto is in a dilapidated building with old junkers parked in front and RON'S spelled out in hubcaps on the fence. If you're looking for a car that actually starts, I'd probably look somewhere else.

You get a little of everything on Cummings Road. Mom says it's like a living bookshelf, each piece of property a separate, distinct story. If that's true, then it's a shelf organized by wacky Bernice Rawlins, mom's co-worker. When she puts away the books at the Nine Mile Falls Library, you never know what will end up where. She once put How to Be Lovers for the Rest of Your Lives in the children's section next to Horton Hears A Who.

The best part of Cummings Road, though, is Moon Point, a part of Mount Solitude. Paragliders leap from Moon Point in numbers that are almost mystical - thirty-five at one count, soaring like brilliant butterflies and floating so close to the road before they land that if you ever drive past in a convertible, you worry that a sudden, unexpected passenger might drop in. There is something special about the winds there, how they whip down from Mount Solitude and swirl back up again. I don't know how it works; I only know that people come from all over to paraglide off Moon Point. There's even a school on the grounds, the Seattle Paragliding Club, housed in an old barn. The club's logo, wings carrying a heart aloft, is painted on the side of the barn, huge and colorful.

You get all kinds at Moon Point - the professionals with their gliders all rolled up into neon cocoons and strapped to their backpacks with precision, and the people who don't have a clue what they're doing and get stuck in the trees. Chip Jr., my younger brother, saw one once as we drove past. "There's a paraglider in that tree," he said, his face tilted up toward the window. I didn't believe him - Chip Jr.'s favorite joke, after all, is telling you that he saw the governor in the men's bathroom on his field trip to the state capitol. But sure enough, there was a guy stuck high in a fir, his legs dangling down and his glider tangled hopelessly in the branches.

I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward from the continued motion of the glider, which billows down like a setting sun. I never get tired of watching them and I've seen them thousands of times. I always wondered what that kind of freedom would feel like.

That day, I stopped at Moon Point for a while. I walked past the row of cars that were always parked in front of the school - active, mud-splattered cars and trucks. I looked for my favorite one - the van with a whale painted on the side and an I LOVE POTHOLES bumper sticker, and was happy when I saw it there. A car with a sense of humor. I sat on the ground with my chin pointing upward and counted an even twenty paragliders soaring against the wooded backdrop of Mount Solitude. I stayed a long while, sat on the grass, and listened for the flapping sound of tight nylon wings against the wind. I had some things to think about. That morning, even before my alarm clock went off, I could hear my mother running the vacuum. It was a bad sign, a sure start to at least three days of hurricane cleaning, endless whiffs of lemon Pledge, odd colored liquids in the toilet bowls, the seeek, seeek sound of paper towels wiping down ammonia-squirted mirrors. This cleaning - it meant that my father was coming. It meant that my mother would once again lose her heart to a man who was no longer even her husband, but whose ring she still wore on a chain around her neck. And it meant that my brother and I would be walking around the broken pieces of that heart for days after he left.

I watched the paragliders until the sun snuck behind Mount Solitude. The shadow it cast quickly stole all of the summer heat, and so I decided to head home.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Honey, Baby, Sweetheart by Deb Caletti Copyright © 2004 by Deb Caletti. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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