Brody, Jessica. 52 Reasons to Hate My Father.

Brody, Jessica.   52 Reasons to Hate My Father.  Macmillan/Farrar Strauss 340p      $16.99      978-0-374-32303-5   jr/sr  VG-BN   Realistic Fiction

What teenager doesn’t rant and rave that parents are too strict or from another world?  Lexi’s father holds the purse strings to a twenty five million dollar trust fund.  He doesn’t feel that Lexi is mature enough to handle the money because she spends all of her time shopping and carousing the nightlife, and she has recently crashed her new Mercedes while drunk. His solution for solving Lexi’s immaturity and lack of appreciation for money provides youngsters with humorous read.

Her father assigns fifty-two menial jobs that Lexi must successfully complete for a week.  Then to make matters worse, he hires Luke Carver as an intern and assigns him the job of making sure Lexi gets to the jobs on time and completes them.  The jobs provide Lexi with insight into tasks she has never done before.  They include cleaning house with a vacuum cleaner, mucking out horse stalls, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant, digging graves, milking cows, working as a crossing guard, gutting fish at a seafood market, delivering flowers, and telemarketing, to name a few.  It is at a Don Juan Tacos that Lexi finally realizes that this could be fun and mean something, that there are friends to be made, and that the arrogant intern Luke might not be so bad after all.

In this story, readers learn that love is unconditional and one must give it to receive it.  Lexi’s fifty-two reasons for hating her father become meaningless as she realizes she only needs one reason to love.

Family life-Fiction, Money-Fiction, Romance, Consequences-Fiction                                                                   --Linda McNeil