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March 2006

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
by Deb Caletti

The first thing I learned about Travis Becker was that he parked his motorcycle on the front lawn. You could see the tracks of it all the way up that rolling hill, cutting deeply into the beautiful, golf course-like grass. That should have told me all I needed to know, right there.

I'm not usually a reckless person. What happened the summer of my junior year was not about recklessness. It was about the way a moment, a single moment, could change things and make you decide to try to be someone different. I'm sure I made that decision the very moment I saw that metal, the glint of it in the sun, looking hot to the touch, looking like an invitation…

Reckless is the last thing you’d call me. Shy is the usual word. I’m one of the people doomed to be known by a single, dominant feature. You know the people I mean – the Fat Girl, the Tall Guy, the Brain. I'm the Quite Girl. I even heard someone say it a few years ago, as I sat in a bathroom stall. "Do you know Ruby McQueen?" someone said. I think it was Wendy Craig, whose ankles I had just whacked with too much pleasure during floor hockey. And then came the answer: "Oh, is she That Quiet Girl?"

In the summer of her junior year, sixteen-year-old Ruby McQueen falls hopelessly in love with "bad-boy daredevil" Travis Becker. Her involvement with this handsome, motorcycle-riding, rich kid has one major appeal: she likes that he sees her as fearless. On the downside, Travis is palpably dangerous, and Ruby is somewhat mesmerized by his charisma and gradually gets sucked into first reckless and then criminal acts. When Travis' destructive and wild behavior gets totally out of control, things between them go downhill. She has to make the tough decision to break off her relationship with her good-looking but troubled boyfriend and is forced to part ways.

Ruby and her mother, both nursing broken hearts, set out on a journey to reunite an elderly woman with her long-lost love, and in the process, learn many things about "the real ties that bind" people to one another. This quest for the missing loved one is eventually successful, but has a tragic and poignant conclusion.

This synopsis was written by a San José Public Library librarian

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