Beginner's Luck

December 2, 2002
When Hallie Palmer, a 16-year-old gambling whiz kid, gets kicked off her Ohio high school's soccer team for skipping class, she quits school altogether. With her parents and six siblings breathing down her neck, she also decides to leave her chaotic home, hiding in the summerhouse of the Stocktons—the delightfully quirky family for whom she's just started doing yard work. Pedersen (Going Away Party), a wunderkind in her own right who had a seat on the floor of the American Stock Exchange at the age of 20, uses her financial background and expertise as a childhood card shark to concoct this buoyantly zany coming-of-age tale. Hallie is at first perplexed and then captivated by the Dickensian residents of the Stockton manse. There's the enthusiastically eccentric, multi-cause obsessed Olivia, the 62-year-old grande dame of the family who takes care of her Alzheimer's-afflicted husband; Bernard, her foppish son, who owns an antique store and is a gourmet cook of outlandish theme meals; his partner, Mr. Gil, the self-proclaimed "normal one," who is into "tooth prognostication"; and Rocky, a mixed drink–guzzling chimpanzee trained to work with paraplegics. Pedersen has a knack for capturing tart teenage observations in witty asides, and Hallie's naïveté, combined with her gambling and numbers savvy, make her a winning protagonist. As the first trade paperback original in the five-year-old Ballantine Reader's Circle series, this novel is funny and just quirky enough to become a word-of-mouth favorite. A preview of Pedersen's next book, an unlikely romantic comedy featuring a terminally ill Scotsman and a dying cloistered nun, also shows great promise. Agent, Judith Ehrlich. (Jan.)Forecast:Pedersen is already a TV personality with a show on Oxygen cable,
Your Money & Your Life. There should be ample crossover interest from her fans.

January 15, 2003
Pedersen began her writing career with a memoir, Play Money: My Brief but Brilliant Career on Wall Street, followed by her fiction debut, Going Away Party. In her second attempt at a coming-of-age novel, she tells the story of the odd child out finding herself amidst a collection of odd folk. Narrator and troubled teen Hallie Palmer runs away from her very normal, if very large, family after her parents announce the impending arrival of child number eight. A neighboring family who has cornered the market on zaniness rescues her, and their exploits and interactions make for lively reading that almost covers the blandness of the plot. Like her previous effort, this novel is stronger in its parts than in the whole. A light read, this is not an essential purchase. [A Ballantine Reader's Circle selection.]-Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2002
Sixteen-year-old Hallie Palmer is bored with school and alienated from her family. She spends her spare time at the racetrack or crashing the secret, weekly poker game in the church basement. When she drops out of school, loses her savings at the track, runs away from home, and then is accused of robbery, it seems things have nowhere to go but up--and that's exactly what happens in this novel from Oxygen TV host Pedersen. Temporarily homeless and short of cash, Hallie takes a job as "yard person" for the quirky Stocktons and winds up finding the family she's always wanted. Olivia Stockton, a free-spirited, 60-something radical, schools Hallie in feminism, politics, and literature, while her son, Bertie, and his lover, Gil, introduce her to fine cuisine and culture. Pedersen overdoes the Stocktons' peculiarities--their household includes a bartending chimpanzee--and Hallie's incessant wisecracking soon wears thin. Still, this is a breezy coming-of-age novel with an appealing cast of characters. It's perfect book-club fare, and a reading group guide is included.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)