Purple is My Game, Morgan is My Name

Miller (My Crazy Cousin Courtney) here serves up standard middle-grade fiction fare, adding extra spice with a key ingredient: her high-spirited, opinionated 12-year-old narrator, a girl with a passion for purple and a penchant for changing her name. Though Morgan's domestic situation may be unorthodox (she shares a Greenwich Village apartment with her father, while her advertising exec mother lives in Tokyo), her preoccupations are not. She longs for a boyfriend, an exotic career and for her divorced parents to rekindle their relationship. Morgan's paths to these goals take some amusing if occasionally implausible directions (e.g., her aspirations to movie stardom are fulfilled when she slips on a Twinkie on the set and the director, who fears she'll sue, offers her a role in his film). The heroine's misadventures culminate in an equally unlikely ending, when her struggling artist father sells three of his paintings for a hefty sum out of the blue--or, as Morgan would have it, out of the purple. Though middle-graders are asked to suspend disbelief, they may well find Morgan a colorful and likable protagonist. Ages 9-12. (Feb.)