Book Review: 102 Days of Lying About Lauren by Maura Jortner

Publisher’s description

After being abandoned by her mother in a most unusual place, a defiant heroine sticks to her plan for staying hidden—even though getting caught could mean saving her life.

Twelve-year-old Mouse calls an amusement park home.

Nobody notices her, and that’s the way she likes it. Mouse sweeps the streets and wears a uniform she “borrowed” and sleeps on the top floor of the Haunted House of Horrors. She knows which security guards to avoid, eats the bagel left out each morning for the Ghost of Summer (a popular theme park legend), and even has the taco guy convinced that her lunch is paid for. She has her special hiding methods down to a science.

But one morning, a girl named Cat comes looking for Lauren Suszek. Cat notices her, and Mouse doesn’t like it. Mouse cannot let this nosy pest find out who she really is! If Mouse gets discovered living in the park, Mama might come back for her, and Mouse doesn’t want that. Or—even worse?—Mama might not come back at all.

Mouse knows she can lose this girl without blowing her cover. She just has to follow her rules. A carefully constructed life in the park is all she needs. Right?

Anchored by memorable characters and an extraordinary setting, Maura Jortner’s brilliant debut novel is bursting with grit, humor, and heart.

Amanda’s thoughts

This book hits that sweet spot of upper middle grade. The age rec from the publisher is 8-12 but I really think it’s perfect for right around 11-13. The main character is 12, but the other two prominent characters are 14 and 16. Mouse, our main character, is also pretending to be 16, something she can get away with because she’s very tall for her age (and because she’s not interacting with enough people that anyone would interrogate that). I will also say, especially because it’s a current discourse, I like that this feels like upper middle grade and is relatively short (224 pages). For those of us who work directly with children and teens, we KNOW that plenty of kids want shorter books for a million reasons—they’re busy, they’re still emerging as readers, they are juggling multiple books (listen, if we want kids to read for fun, we have to understand they are trying to do that on top of book circles in classes and/or in supplemental classes like GT or ELL etc), they want to finish a book by next library cycle in school, etc—and giving them those shorter, quality books to read helps them see success in finishing a book and feeling good about themselves as readers. Kids who read long books will surely still read a short book, but kids whose sweet spot is a shorter book NEED to be able to find them because they may not grab or make it through a long book. The thing is, I’m drawn more to shorter books too (you may notice a lot of my reviews are of graphic novels or middle grade books or novels in verse). It’s okay to not want the world to be filled with ONLY doorstopper tomes. They can exist! They’re great! Readers love them! But it’s not either/or, it’s both/and. ANYWAY. Need a shorter upper middle grade book? Here you go.

(Whew. Sorry.)

Mouse, aka Lauren, has been living in secret at an amusement park for 102 days. Her mother abandoned her there and Lauren, unsure what to do, just hid out and hung around, acting as though she’s employed there. It’s big enough that no one catches her out. Is that realistic? Maybe. I don’t actually care. Even when I kept thinking something felt unbelievable, I kept reminding myself that all kinds of horrible things happen to kids and they somehow survive or live under the radar. Parents make all kinds of awful choices—abandoning a child in an amusement park—and kids are just left to figure stuff out. Mouse blends in, keeps busy, and manages to survive all this time alone. But when a massive storm strikes the park and a person from her past appears, things start to unravel. She can’t hide anymore. Finally—and thank goodness—she’s on someone’s radar.

The story is less about how Mouse actually survives alone all summer (though we do get peeks into where she stays, how she cleans herself, and so on) and more about what happens during the storm—the truth about her friend Tanner (her only real friend in the park) comes out, and they, together with this other person from Mouse’s past, all get trapped in the storm, with Tanner suffering significant injuries. Though the core of the story is trauma (for both Mouse and Tanner), Jortner somehow manages to make the story feel exciting and adventurous, and even quite funny at times, despite the heavy reasons why Mouse is at the park. It’s a great book to hand to kids who want something meaty and “real” without being overbearingly heavy or sad. Looking forward to seeing what Jortner does next!

Review copy (ARC) courtesy of the publisher

ISBN-13: 9780823453627
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 06/20/2023
Age Range: 8 – 12 Years

Filed under: Book Reviews