Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek

This book was okay. It was about an 11-year-old girl growing up in the South. She starts to notice her father's increasingly friendly relationship with the "tomato girl" - the girl who sells tomatoes to his store. As she copes with no longer being the most important woman in her father's life, she also begins to lose her mother to mental illness.

The narrator's voice was memorable...precocious and caught between wanting to take care of her mother and wanting her father to take care of her. She also goes through the pain of discovering the meaning behind the things that she sees going on between her father and the Tomato Girl. It was sad to see how lost the narrator was as an 11-year-old and how she didn't know (as the reader did) that these were not things someone her age should have to deal with herself.

However, I didn't love reading the book. I didn't find myself rooting for the narrator consistently and I didn't think the writing was anything special.