Miss Smithers

Susan Juby

HarperTempest

Susan Juby’s lit­er­ate teen novel Alice, I Think (Thistledown Press, 2000), tells the story of an eccen­tric girl mud­dling through life in a small British Columbia town. Juby wrote two best­selling sequels and has since become a teen-fiction phe­nom­e­non. In her sec­ond novel, Miss Smithers (HarperTempest), Alice, the charm­ing hero­ine, enters the town’s beauty pageant as the nom­i­nee of the local Rod and Gun Club. At first her hip­pie par­ents are shocked and dis­mayed by her inter­est in a sex­ist and oppres­sive event, but Alice, as always, puts her unique spin on the com­pe­ti­tion. Things heat up when she starts a zine to assess the com­pe­ti­tion and expose the inner work­ings of the pageant. Alice just can’t go with the flow, but her real prob­lem is that she doesn’t know why she seems so strange to the aver­age Smithers res­i­dent. Readers won’t be able to resist the con­vinc­ing char­ac­ters or the ripe com­edy of Miss Smithers.