Fun coming of age novel but the narrator's voice sounded just a little too mature and insightful for a 9th grader. ( )

Fourteen year old Janie Gorman used to love living on the “farm.” In fact, after a field trip to a farm in which fresh goat cheese was the highlight, a precocious nine-year-old Janie decided that having chickens and goats and living on a farm would be a great life, and her enthusiasm for the idea spread to her parents, tapping into their long-forgotten dreams of living sustainably and escaping the city lifestyle. That’s how Janie finds herself living in an 1800′s era farmhouse and waking up way too early each morning to milk the goats and feed the chickens, which wreaks havoc on her entry into high school, not to mention her family life and foibles being aired on her mother’s farm blog. Janie and her best friend Sarah are determined to be successful in high school, following in the steps of Sarah’s popular, wild, yet still straight-A sister, Emma. But two months into the school year, Janie is eating lunch in the school library (all right, on the way to the library), and hoping desperately that her mother hasn’t mentioned anything about her in the latest blog. But after a school assembly, Sarah decides that she and Janie should join the high school Jam Band, and that’s how they meet Jeremy and Monster.

If you were to put semi-realistic teen girl fiction on a scale with Caletti at the top and Dessen at the middle, this one is probably going to hover somewhere in the bottom half. Although it is easy to read and has a fairly likable character, there isn’t really much in the way of substance. Yes, Janie experiences ostracism from the other girls because of her odd family life, and yes, she and her best friend go through periods where they can’t stand each other, and yes, they have boy problems and parental problems. But otherwise, there isn’t much to the story despite Dowell’s attempt to infuse it with some historical significance by having Janie’s father be involved in living history projects. ( )

copyright 2011 [sic] ( )

As a child, Janie miraculously convinced her parents to buy a small farm and move out into the countryside. She loved it then, but now that she's a freshman in a massive high school, she's rather embarrassed to be the "farm girl." She doesn't have but one friend, and isn't sure what her place in life is... she just wants to be normal.
So of course, during the course of the book, she finds friends, finds some meaning in life, and comes to terms with the farm.
I liked the characters (especially Monster and Verbena, the two new friends Janie makes) but found the farm side of the story rather superfluous. The farm life didn't seem to be relevant to anything else about the book. There were also a few elements that didn't really seem credible, and in a book based in the real world, they should have been. That Janie would be laughing stock at school because she had a strand of hay in her hair, or got a rash once, seemed a stretch. That she could learn to passably play a bass in one lesson, and that other friends later learned to passably play accordions in a short time, was unbelievable.
I enjoyed Dowell's other books that I have read more than this one. It was decent, but not inspired. ( )

I wasn't expecting much from this book. I ended up liking it a lot. Janie convinces her family to move to a farm because it would be so fun. By the time she gets to high school she is rethinking it. After a disastrous experience with goat poop she has to find a way to climb the popularity ladder and make some friends. So she learns the bass and joins jam band. All the while she is learning about the local civil rights movement and what it means to "live large" ( )