Lucky Breaks

Life in Hard Pan, California (population 43), feels a bit ordinary to almost-eleven-year-old Lucky. Her best friend, Lincoln, is a boy, and his preoccupation with tying knots seems, well, boring. Then Lucky meets Paloma, who is visiting Hard Pan with her geologist uncle, and Lucky realizes that what she wants is a girl best friend, an adventurous girl. "And without even knowing that she'd been looking, now Lucky longed for that girl to be Paloma." Unfortunately, Paloma lives two hundred miles away, and her mother is so overprotective she might not let Paloma return to Hard Pan. Black-and-white illustrations.