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In 1970 Vancouver, thirteen-year-old Charlotte and her best friend, Dawn, are keen to avoid the pitfalls of adolescence. Couldn't they just skip teenhood altogether, along with its annoying behaviors - showing off just because you have a boyfriend, obsessing about marriage and a ring and matching dining-room furniture? Couldn't one just learn about life from Jane Austen and spend the days eating breakfast at noon, watching "People in Conflict," and thrift-store shopping for cool castoffs to tie-dye for the upcoming outdoor hippie music festival?

But life becomes more complicated when the girls meet a Texan draft dodger who comes to live with Charlotte's Quaker family. Tom Ed expands Charlotte's horizons as they discuss everything from war to civil disobedience to women's liberation. Grappling with exhilarating and disturbing new ideas, faced with a censorship challenge to her beloved English teacher and trying to decode the charismatic draft dodger himself, Charlotte finds it harder and harder to stick to her unteen philosophy, and to see eye to eye with Dawn.

SARAH ELLIS is a celebrated author, teacher and children's literature expert. She has written more than twenty books across the genres, and her books have been translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Chinese and Japanese. She has won the Governor General's Literary Award (Pick-Up Sticks), the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award (Odd Man Out) and the Sheila Egoff Award. Her first novel, The Baby Project, remains a children's classic, still in print more than thirty years after publication.

Sarah is a masthead reviewer for the Horn Book Magazine, and she is a former faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts.