Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 12:36 p.m.

It’s rather a miracle that I even read The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland. From time to time, I get to pick a free download from a list, and it’s possible I thought Rebekah Crane’s novel had something to do with President Grover Cleveland, the only man to hold the office in separate terms.

Grover at Camp Padua in the present is nothing like Grover at the White House in the 19^th Century.

It took me forever to read it because I began it with disinterest. The only time I read it was when I had some time to kill and my cell. For some reason, I was reading a non-fiction book in hardcover, one novel in my phone, and another in my Kindle. These are not my optimum reading habits. In the Kindle and the phone, I could have interchanged. I could have read The Celebrant in the phone and Grover Cleveland in the Kindle. I could have switched back and forth. I didn’t because I didn’t. Not everything makes sense.

I bumbled along, a chapter here, a chapter there, stop when the food arrives, until the story finally captured my fancy, sort of a dry piece of tinder that finally lit after dozens of futile matches.

This is a novel for young adults. I haven’t been one in decades. My own novels typically have young adults in them, but they are characters, not principal figures. I pay close attention to the young because I am cognizant of and fascinated by how much the environment has changed since I was diving into and almost drowning on the way out of rites of passage.

I was never “an at-risk teen,” as Zander, Cassie, Grover, Bek, and all the others most definitely are. Zander Osborne is the narrator, marred by tragedy but not as obviously affected by her trauma as Cassie, who loves nothing more than alienating everyone around here; Grover, who expects to one day be schizophrenic because it seems mathematically likely; and Bek, a pathological liar who eventually grows up to be president (kidding).

Somehow they all become close in spite of the worst intentions of everyone except Grover, who publicly expresses his love of Zander early and throughout the yarn. Cassie resents being unloved even though she does everything she can to alienate those around her.

I expected a tragic ending, but the author rescued me, and particularly Cassie, from it. They all probably didn’t live happily ever after, but that’s the direction they’re headed by the time the tale is told.

 

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The new novel, my eighth, is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.