Me and the Blondes

“How did your poor husband pass away?”
Make it simple, Mama, I tried to bore into her, simple, simple…
“His brains exploded.”
 I heard a gasp. It was me.
“An aneurysm?”
“Okay,” said Mama.
 “I’m sorry, hon,” said Mrs. Haver. “At least it was fast.”
 “It vas?” Mama looked puzzled. I nodded furiously at her. “Ya. It vas. Yours?”
“Heart attack.”
“Oooo, dat’s good too.”
I could’ve killed her.

Sophie Kandinsky has spent the last six years trying to keep her crazy family life secret. The devil is in the details. The first detail is her larger-than-life, eccentric, Bulgarian mother. The slightly larger detail is the fact that her gentle, poet-father has been charged with murder. All Sophie wants is to be adored and invincible, which is really hard once people find out her father’s in prison.

But this time, after yet another move to another new school, and another opportunity to wipe the slate clean, Sophie has devised a plan. On her first day of school, she will locate The Blondes—that clique of perfect, confident girls who are beyond gossip and reproach—and she will make them her friends. This time, no one will find out the truth. This time, everything will be brilliant.TERESA TOTEN is an award-winning writer who was born in Zagreb, Croatia, but left for Canada on that same day. Although she’s lived in Toronto for most of her life, Teresa has also lived in Delhi (Ontario), Montreal, Ottawa, and New York. She developed her broad taste in reading as a result of her non-English-speaking mother’s habit of filling shopping bags full of books from wildly different sections of the local library. Teresa has twice been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, for The Game in 2001 and for Me and the Blondes in 2006.