The Vine: June 6, 2014
The time would have been the early aughts, although I think the book was several years older. I found it in a library but for some reason I remember think maybe it’d been written around 1999.
Could be wrong there though. It was set in Australia but in a casual kind of way where I didn’t notice until I was most of the way through the book. I’m pretty sure the writer was Australian or at least lived there because of that.
Anyway the basic plot was this: girl starts a new school and makes two best friends, a boy and a girl. Girl lives with her stepmom because her mom’s dead. Girl finds out female best friend is gay and freaks out because her mom was gay too and she really hated it when she found out about her mom. She hated it so much that she ran away from home to find her dad but her dad kicked her out so she ended up living on the street because she didn’t want to go back home to her mom. She ends up getting really sick and finally calls her mom to come get her. Then her mom gets hit by a drunk driver on the way to get her some meds or something so she ends up with her stepmom and that brings us back to the beginning of the story.
I don’t remember any names or anything else about it but I’ve been trying to look for this book for about ten years now since I remembered reading it. I’m really hoping someone else ran across this one too. It sounds way more melodramatic in the description than I remember it being.
Sincerely,
The Girl With The Weak Google-Fu
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
I’m guessing it’s Sue Hines’ Out of the Shadows
Sorry, lost my link–here’s the Amazon link to Out of the Shadows:
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Shadows-Sue-Hines/dp/0380811928/
Seems to be Out of the Shadows by Sue Hines: http://www.amazon.com/Out-Shadows-Sue-Hines/dp/0380811928/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402066816&sr=8-1&keywords=Out+of+the+Shadows+Sue+Hines
I don’t have time to go through each of these, but maybe your book can be found in this list:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/user_vote/2805492
This is not the least bit helpful to the questioner, but if anyone is into YA-ish Australian books, Jaclyn Moriarty is excellent: http://www.jaclynmoriarty.com/Books.html.
Could this be it?
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Shadows-Sue-Hines/dp/0704349752
Wow–TM readers are incredible! I predict a future “Ask the Readers” where the correct answer is submitted in comments before the question is even posted! Assuming, you know, the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey thing is real.
My favorite Australian YA books are ‘Tomorrow, When the War Began’ (+ sequels) by John Marsden.
@Emma: Marsdens Letters from the inside is my favourite, though I like the Tomorrow-series – and the Ellie-triology that follows it up, – too.
For NZ YA I recommend Margaret Mahy, by the way. I know it’s not the same country, but for me, literally on the other side of the Earth, it gets sort of clumped together, “Australia and NZ”.