My Life as a Girl

First-novelist Mosier authors a sharp-edged romance about an Arizona native hoping to reinvent herself when she goes ""back East"" to college. Entering Bryn Mawr, Jaime Cody wants to bury her recent past: the arrest of her father for embezzlement, her degrading waitress jobs and her fling with Buddy the ""cowboy."" All goes well until Buddy arrives on campus, ""hell bent"" on bringing her home. At this point, readers are taken back in time as Jaime recounts her last summer ""as a girl,"" when she skirts the fate she used to joke about with her best friend, Rosa: ""hitched to some loser guy right out of high school, cramped into a trailer in Happy Tepee RV Park, selling fry bread with beans at the mall, drinking beer at desert parties."" Mosier cleanly slices Jaime's life into three phases: her upper-middle-class childhood; her traumatic adolescence, when financial security slips away as quickly as her trust in her father; and her emergence into adulthood, when she can view her own mistakes and her parents' mistakes objectively. Featuring lifelike dialogue, three-dimensional characters and an upbeat outcome, the novel also serves up glossy, attention-getting prose (""That was the beginning, as blind and misguided as most beginnings are"") that will appeal to female teens not quite ready to bid their own ""girlhoods"" good-bye. Ages 12-up. (May)