Prom

For a grown-up, Laurie Halse Anderson sure knows high school.

Her first young adult novel, Speak, the story of a ninth-grade outcast, collected a vast number of awards, including finalist for the National Book Award. Prom is set to do just as well. It’s set in Anderson’s adopted home of Philadelphia, in a neighborhood of hard-working people with no money to spare. Our homegrown hero is 18-year-old Ashley Hannigan, a self-proclaimed “normal” kid whose grades are nothing to write home about and whose family, though happy, is a little nuts.

“Don’t think it was quiet,” she says, introducing readers to her house. On any given day she might hear her dad noisily dry-walling her long-time-in-coming bedroom in the basement, or her mom hollering at her to hang up the wash, or her little brothers Shawn, Steven and Billy playing “baseball” with hot dogs in the kitchen.

But Ashley has bigger problems than her overly boisterous family. She’s trying to graduate from Carceras—which is the kind of city high school that has fist fights and metal detectors alongside students who score full-tuition scholarships to college—but getting out will be no small feat with the number of detention hours she has to put in by June. She’s also toying with the idea of moving in with her boyfriend TJ, but he’s unreliable and a bit of a skeeze.

And then there’s prom. Ashley isn’t a “prom-type person,” but her best friend Nat has been dreaming about it for months. Natalia, who moved next door from Russia in third grade and has always “flirted with dorkdom,” was one of several prom committee members who have problems at home and for whom the magic of prom night means a lot. “Prom was stupid for me,” Ashley explains, “but not for them, and I wasn’t such a butthead that I couldn’t see the difference.”

Through Ashley’s eyes Anderson nails the high school experience, both the way it is now and the things that never change. When their math teacher freaks out and gives them a pop quiz worth forty percent of the grade, “Our mouths weren’t moving, but our eyes were, blinking and flashing like billboards. Some people were saying, “Bitch is wack,” and some people were saying, “Forty percent?” and some people were saying, “She’s high.”

She wasn’t high, but she was about to get busted—for “misappropriating” the prom committee’s funds. With no money and only a week to spare, the school cancels the dance. (Oops. Nat would scold me for that. “It’s not a dance, it’s the prom.”)

In the interest of helping her friend, Ashley finds herself working with the hated school administration to save something she didn’t think she cared about, and Anderson finds humor and heartache in a situation that’s pretty ordinary. But that’s the key to the book’s success: how normal it is, and real. In fact, Anderson has dedicated her book “to all the ‘normal’ kids who ... told me nobody ever writes about them.”

Like any gifted storyteller, Anderson didn’t live the life she’s writing about, but somehow she just knows. She knows that Philly kids lick the salt off their soft pretzels first, that every other Catholic girl’s middle name is Marie, and that students often know better than their teachers about what’s good for them. And for sheer funness of reading, Prom can’t be beat. Ashley is a delightful narrator, and her voice carries the story swiftly along on a current of truth-telling, funny pop-culture references, and realistic kidspeak. “Snoop Dogg looked skizzle-old, if you ask me,” she offers, gazing at the TV.

It would be easy, with a character like this, to give the story a cop-out fairy-tale ending—girl gets her head on straight, girl gets out of the neighborhood—but as she does with the rest of the book, Anderson makes her upbeat conclusion totally realistic (even though, truth be told, she has a fairy godmother of sorts). Ashley already has her head on straight, despite what her sadistic vice principal thinks, and the craziness of trying to save a prom in peril only serves to bolster her sense of self. After all, you can experience plenty of magic without leaving the neighborhood—and that’s something Philly folks just know.