In which I continue reviewing the Mock Newbery Awards for 2017...
In rural Florida in 1975, three girls become friends among their very different life struggles.
Raymie Clark is determined to learn to twirl the baton so that she can win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire beauty pageant. She hopes that her father, who ran off with a dental hygienist, will be in a diner with the hygienist, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper, will see that Raymie won and will come home. Louisiana Elefante lives with her not-quite-sane grandmother in a house with no furniture and nothing to eat but tuna fish. She also wants to win the pageant because the money would help her escape her dire situation. Beverly Tapinski, a groomed beauty queen by her former beauty queen mother, has an understandable animosity towards a pageant she has been forced to enter and wants to sabotage it. Apparently their baton teacher feels the same way.
"Nightingale" comes from a Florence Nightingale book given to Raymie by the school librarian who hoped she would read some nonfiction. She had not bothered; she does not like nonfiction, but she does learn who Florence Nightingale is and what she represents. The girls become utterly dependent on each other as most of the adults in their lives are either physically or emotionally absent, and they become the "Three Rancheros." They go to a nursing home to try to save a library book lost there in "doing a good deed" (reading to an ornery old woman who does not want to be read to) and to a very sad animal shelter to try to rescue a cat.
The setting is depressing; the small-town impoverished South, and the girls' situations even sadder, but the character development for all three is outstanding and the ending is worthwhile.
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