The Ashwater Experiment, Amy Goldman Koss

For the eighteenth time since kinder-garten, twelve-year-old Hillary will enter a new school, and from years of experi-ence she anticipates the territory with its familiar cast of characters: the class clown, the popular girls, the really smart kid, and the sleepwalkers, "the kids who make up most of the class." Her likable, peripa-tetic, hippie-holdover parents travel the country selling handmade gizmos, "jewelry, refrigerator magnets, toothpick holder...recycled rearrangement[s] of resources."...

For the eighteenth time since kinder-garten, twelve-year-old Hillary will enter a new school, and from years of experi-ence she anticipates the territory with its familiar cast of characters: the class clown, the popular girls, the really smart kid, and the sleepwalkers, "the kids who make up most of the class." Her likable, peripa-tetic, hippie-holdover parents travel the country selling handmade gizmos, "jewelry, refrigerator magnets, toothpick holder...recycled rearrangement[s] of resources."...