Rebel McKenzie
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Rebel McKenzie wants to spend her summer attending the Ice Age Kids' Dig and Safari, a camp where kids discover prehistoric bones, right alongside real paleontologists. But digs cost money, and Rebel is broker than four o'clock. When she finds out her annoying neighbor Bambi Lovering won five hundred dollars by playing a ukulele behind her head in a beauty contest, Rebel decides to win the Frog Level Volunteer Fire Department's beauty pageant. Rebel may not be a typical pageant contestant, but how hard can it be? Rebel's dramatic reading about life is the Pleistocene era is sure to blow away the competition. It turns out that winning a beauty pageant is harder than it looks. By the end of the summer, Rebel has learned a thing or two about her true calling that will surprise everyone -- most of all, herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ransom (Ida Honeysuckle Discovers the World) again creates a heroine with an unusual passion: 12-year-old Rebel McKenzie wants to be a paleontologist, and her goal this summer is to attend the Ice Age Kids' Dig and Safari. Instead, she is stuck babysitting her seven-year-old nephew, Rudy, in a mobile home while her 26-year-old sister, Lynette, attends beauty school. An outgoing smart aleck with a talent for "burp-talking," Rebel decides along with new friend Lacey Jane to enter a local beauty pageant to win the money she needs for the Dig. Peopled by offbeat characters including an annoyingly perfect pageant winner named Bambi; elderly Odenia Matthews, a former hand model who trains the girls for the pageant; and an enormous cat named Doublewide the book is especially strong in the development of Rebel's relationship with Rudy, who talks to God at lunchtime and is obsessed with fashion for corpses. Surprises in both plot and character development create a quick pace; extra material like Rudy's cartoons and pages from Rebel's "field notebook" provide welcome and often amusing insight. Ages 9 12.
