The Girl Who Wanted to Be Like a Spoon

THE GIRL WHO WANTED TO BE LIKE A SPOON is a glimpse of a teenage girl's life as she wanders through the shadowy world of Swansea Beach Amusement Park in the summer of 1967. Penny lives with her parents and older sister in a grimy apartment sandwiched between an arcade, a fun house, and a French fry stand. Her parents, preoccupied with running a large arcade, ply Penny with quarters for games and daily hamburgers, clueless of her life selling newspapers in bars and forging friendships with the hippies who sleep under the pier, a cabalistic clown, an erudite sex worker, and a fortune teller. Penny's once-innocent world begins to spin out of control when she gets a crush on an older woman and faces the tragic loss of a cherished friend and protector. She struggles to make sense of the changes in herself and a world reeling in the tumult of the 1960s, turning inward in an existential search for meaning. Penny emerges a stronger person, but an encounter with her crush fifteen years later shakes her beliefs about herself and the past. Penny's story reveals life's profound and sometimes disturbing truths, but always tenderly, through the lens of childlike innocence and the enchantment of a coming-of-age story that will touch readers young and old.