It's About Love

Gr 9 Up—Star-crossed lovers, people from two different worlds, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks—Camden takes all of these clichés and blows past them in this novel. Luke is smart and creative and sees the world as a filmmaker does. He's been filling notebooks with observations and bits of dialogue for years. He will be a screenwriter or filmmaker some day if he stays out of trouble and successfully becomes the first in his family to attend college. Fellow film studies student Leia may be better off financially than Luke, but she has known grief in her life, which grounds her. The semester has just begun when Luke's older brother is released from jail. Having Marc around changes almost all the dynamics of Luke's life and causes some very bad people to pay attention to Luke's family. There are film script directions interspersed throughout, setting up scenes. The story moves quickly, and one can almost see the movie it would make: a rougher John Hughes romance. While "working class meets upper class" may sound like a familiar tale, these characters are not stereotypes but real people with complexity and layers. The ending is happier than readers might expect, though it's not all blue skies and rainbows, which is consistent with the honesty with which Camden writes. Readers will want to see the movies Luke and Leia make.