Pageant

Guest Review: The following review is an excerpt from the New York Times, written by Cynthia Samuels. Cynthia Samuels has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for parents and families. She blogs at Don't Gel Too Soon.

FOR anyone who lived through the Kennedy years, the dreams and glory of that time are tough to communicate, especially to younger people. Kathryn Lasky, in her lovely new novel, Pageant, has finally done it. Her heroine, 14-year-old Sarah Benjamin, has strong opinions. The black stableboy statues decorating the yards at the edge of her wealthy Indianapolis neighborhood are ''racist.'' The only possible man to support for President, despite her mostly Republican eighth-grade schoolmates, is John Kennedy. And when things get tough, the only reliable person, the only one who can give her a phrase to get her writing project started or an idea to inspire her science experiment, is her big sister Marla.

Inside her turret bedroom (''it was the smallest bedroom in the house, but it was hers by choice''), she ponders the future: ''Tomorrow this time, Sarah thought, if Kennedy won, nothing would have changed, exactly. The stable-boy statues would still be there. Every substantial home, filled with substantial civic-minded Republicans, would be unchanged. And yet, it would all be different.'' Together, she and Marla wait out the election-night results, and together they celebrate as, in the hours just before dawn, they learn that the man they hope will transform the world order has been elected President. The reader suffers, knowing what Sarah and Marla do not: that their hero will not live to see dreams through to the end . . . neither his nor theirs. Sarah draws on Kennedy's special strength of appeal to lighten her own load, not only as the only Democrat in her private school - and as a member of the only Jewish family in her upper-middle-class suburb - but also as a young woman much more creative and intelligent than either her peers or her teachers. But we worry about her as she does so. And we are right.

You can read the rest of Cynthia's review at the New York Times.