Undercover by Beth Kephart
Elisa, a adolescent Cyrano de Bergerac, uses her love of words, nature and skating to navigate not only school and peer pressure, but also her family's problems. As a spy in Undercover by Beth Kephart, Elisa creates lines of verse to help her fellow male students make their girlfriends and soon-to-be girlfriends swoon. She does so with stealth and folded scraps of paper without much thought, until Theo comes along.
"Dad likes to say, about both of us, that we're undercover operatives who see the world better than the world sees us, and this, I swear, has its benefits." (page 8 )
Elisa takes much of her dad's advice to heart, and much of that is probably because he's away on business a lot of the time. She spends quite a lot of time observing and creating verse until in Honors English she comes upon the tragedy of Cyrano, which effectively turns her philosophy upside down. Beyond spending her days writing poems, she's discovered a pond to provide her inspiration. When it freezes over, she decides to skate . . . something she has never done before.
Undercover is a story about a girl who digs deep for courage, a courage she needs to write, to deal with fellow classmates, and to hold her family together. Readers will connect with Elisa as they would reconnect with themselves, particularly if they were the student with few friends, felt that they were on the outside in many situations, or who wrote in their dark room at night alone. Elisa is that girl in all of us. She's the young woman unsure of herself, her surroundings, and her abilities, but who is pushed beyond her self-imposed limits to reach higher, strive for more and dream big. She does not want to be Cyrano.
Undercover will resonate with readers, push them to feel lonely when Elisa is alone, cheer up when she triumphs, and cry with happiness when all is right with the world. The only drawback is that readers will not want to leave; they'll want to know what happens with Theo, her rivals, and her family. Kephart deftly uses language to paint each scene and elicit emotion, connecting the reader to Elisa through her casual narrative. In many ways, readers will love this as much or more than Kephart's Nothing But Ghosts.
I borrowed my copy of Undercover by Beth Kephart from the public library.
***Also, I forgot to mention that I took this book out upon Jill at Rhapsody in Books' recommendation.***