Copyright: 2009
Candace Thompson is looking forward to a delightful summer, every day fun-filled and spent with her best friend, Tamara. Instead, her father has her apply for a job at The Zone, the local amusement park. Candace is stuck with selling sticky cotton candy outside in the blazing sun eight hours a day, six days a week. Not only is her free time totally consumed by work, but she can no longer attend church and youth group, or hang out with her only real friend.
It isn't long before the first perk to the job comes up, though. Candace meets Kurt, the masked man in the History Zone who she soon has a huge crush on. It's not before the end of her working week yet when she makes another friend, Josh.
Despite Candace's new circle of friends the days at The Zone are getting hotter, and her hours are getting longer. Candace's summer is getting worse and worse including almost getting run over by the park train, her best friend mad at her, failing a drug test, getting stalked for cotton candy by Becca, a fellow park ref with a sugar allergy, and the fact that her new boyfriend is really a high school dropout who lives hours away from his parents and has no ambitions whatsoever.
Is this really the worst summer ever, though? By the end of it, Candace and Tamara make up, her circle of friends has broadened, her team won the end of the year scavenger hunt, she and Kurt, the masked man get together, and a new Zone in the theme park is named after one of her ideas.
In the end, all of Candace's problems are solved, and her new friends invite her back to work at the Scare Zone in the fall. This summer has gone from the worst to one of the best in Candace's life.
The Summer of Cotton Candy is Christian novel. In the first couple of chapters, I thought the book was had a little bit of a strange sense of humor, and was definitely thinking: Ugh! SO not to read! But I decided to stick with it, because something about The Summer of Cotton Candy pulled me in. Later, I realized it was the humor of the book that intrigued me so much to read on. The jokes were different and dramatic, somewhere along the lines of a kid imagining their history teacher being a blood-thirsty monster. Debbie Viguie herself is a bit of a drama queen, I think. She makes work seem so cruel, and the part about Becca, desperate for a taste of sweetness despite her sugar allergy, was definitely weird.
But The Summer of Cotton Candy is different, and funny. Like what it says on the novel back of the book: The Summer of Cotton Candy is a fun, quirky, alternate novel. Debbie Viguie's style of writing is natural and creative, which makes her first novel in the Sweet Seasons series so unique and remarkable.
To Read Not to Read
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