Funny and smart with all the angst and sass of adolescence and a colorful cast of characters, this is a refreshing contemporary coming-of-age YA about one Greek-American girl's odyssey home. Sixteen-year-old Elektra Kamenides is well on her way to becoming a proper southern belle in the small Mississippi college town she calls home. That is, until her mother decides to uproot her and her kid sister Thalia and start over in California. They leave behind Elektra's father—a professor and leading expert on Greek mythology, and Elektra can't understand why. For her, life is tragedy, and all signs point to her family being cursed. Their journey ends in Guadalupe Slough, a community of old Chicano families and oddball drifters sandwiched between San Josénd the southern shores of San Francisco Bay. The houseboat that her mother has bought, sight unseen, is really just an ancient trailer parked on a barge and sunk into a mudflat. What would Odysseus do? Elektra asks herself. Determined to get back to Mississippi at all costs, she'll beg, lie, and steal to get there. But things are not always what they seem, and home is wherever you decide to make it.
Author
I was born on October 19th, 1947 in the hospital at March Air Force Base just outside Riverside, California. My father, Norman, was a career sergeant who'd served as an aircraft mechanic and infantryman in the Philippines campaign early in the war and was taken prisoner on Bataan. My mother, Agnes, was a nurse at the hospital where he was sent to recuperate after the war was over. Until I was fifteen, I lived on or near a number of Air Force bases in this country and in Germany. My sister, Patricia, was born in 1950 at Travis AFB. Until I was six, I wanted to be a fireman. Between six and twelve, I wanted to be a paleontologist. When I was twelve, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I still haven't outgrown that. I made some occasional stabs at writing and submitting manuscripts in my twenties and thirties. When I turned forty-seven, I decided to start writing things more regularly. I've been doing so ever since.
