Karma for Beginners, by Jessica Blank (August 2009)
I wasn't sure about this one, but since it was a free ARC from the ALA conference, I thought I might as well give it a shot. Right off the bat, I liked that the book was set in the mid-1980s instead of current day. Tessa is fourteen and lives with her flaky mom, who pulls up stakes and moves them around pretty often. This time, they move to an ashram near the Catskills, where Tessa feels out of control and out of place. Her mom becomes even less interested in her as she becomes creepily close to the guru of the group, and Tessa finds refuge in a wholly inappropriate place--the arms of the twenty-year-old college dropout who works as the ashram's mechanic.
This is definitely one some parents will find troublesome because, with this older guy, Tessa has sex and does drugs. But the story really reinforces how important strong parent-child relationships are and the importance of supervision and care. It can also bridge the generation gap, showing today's teens that the same problems existed when their parents were kids.
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