For the Love of Pete

Although set in 1977, this story of an adolescent's voyage to meet her father has the sweetly innocent quality of a 1930s movie. Narrator Phoebe, almost 12, leads a Shirley Temple-like existence: she's doted on by former opera star Gram; Bishopp the butler; Bertie the maid and Bertie's younger brother, Billy, the chauffeur, who, in the only nod to contemporaneity, lost an arm in Vietnam. When Gram's always unstable mental condition is deemed hopeless, Phoebe unwillingly leaves her home in rural Georgia and sets off with the other three in Gram's old Deusenberg. Bertie and Billy are to be let off in Virginia, but Phoebe's destination is Maine and the home of the father she's never met. The quartet travels old roads, from one timeless backwater town to another; only when Phoebe, in saying good-bye to Bertie and Billy, relinquishes the past and accepts present circumstances does Bishopp switch to the interstate and speed her to her future. Marino ( The Day That Elvis Came to Town ) has fashioned an elegant and tender homage to classic road pictures, underscored with pointed references to It Happened One Night and Paper Moon . As in those movies, it's not the destination that counts here, but the lessons learned along the way. Ages 10-up. (May)