My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath (260 pages)
Jane Fielding lives a quiet life on a Massachusetts beach with her mother, two brothers, and sister. She prays for one hundred adventures, but her adventures come with new relationships and strange requests. She befriends an unusual preacher, Nellie, who sends Jane up in a hot air balloon to drop Bibles to the people below. She is forced into an unpleasant babysitting situation with the Gourd children - all five of them! She meets an array of men from her mother’s past, one of which is her father. She listens sweetly as her brother shouts, “Whales!” at the ocean for the thousandth time, seeing whales that are only visible to him. She doesn’t have one hundred adventures, but her summer is far from boring!
Miss Simer’s Rating: ***
