Good book about finding one's voice. Katy is seriously unhappy about her summer -- she's been sent to stay with her father in LA while her mom is on an archeological dig in Peru. She and her mom have always been a team and she barely knows her dad, so this seems crazy to Katy. Plus her dad is a punk rock musician and recovered heroin addict. It all just seems like a train wreck waiting to happen. Katy likes things orderly and quiet. As the book and the summer unfold, you realized just how repressed Katy is, how much she needs to be the good girl. There's a line in the book where The Rat (her dad) says what a good job her mom did with Katy, but as a reader and a mother myself I had to wonder -- just who was taking care of whom?