TENDER
Valerie Hobbs
Puffin Books
Young Adult
ISBN: 0142400750
256 pages

Olivia Trager (called Liv) loves New York and her grandmother, who makes oatmeal just the way she likes it. Liv's mother died at her birth and her father left shortly after. Fifteen years have passed, and Liv doesn't know her father at all. But now she is forced by circumstance to move to California. How can she put her resentment of his never sending her as much as a Christmas card during her lifetime behind her? Sam, her
father's girlfriend, helps. Sam reminds Liv of her grandmother and she understands the man Liv finds so bewildering. Sam, Liv, and Liv's father try to make the difficult adjustment of living together after a life apart.

Mark, Liv's father, dives for abalone and lives in an all brown apartment --- nothing at all like the cozy flat Liv shared with her grandmother. He doesn't talk very often, but Liv soon discovers that he has many admirers among his fellow divers. It seems to her that her father has saved his kindness for everyone other than her. When Brian, her father's tender (the person who watches the compressor while the diver is underwater) breaks his arm, Mark asks Liv to take over the job. Working with her father, Liv discovers that the absence of words does not necessarily mean a lack of caring. Love can sometimes be silent.

Alternative families are a common theme in books for young people these days --- not only because more children are growing up in them but because they allow authors to re-imagine how family life works. Valerie Hobbs took full advantage of her imagination when she created the Tragers. When we first meet Liv, she's very much a New Yorker, dressed in solid black with an attitude as spiky as her hair. She softens a bit during the novel, but don't worry, she doesn't become the homecoming queen or Miss Popularity.

Hobbs's treatment of Mark is just as skillful. By allowing us only glimpses of him at the beginning of the novel, we get to know him slowly, as Liv does. In the end, both the reader and Liv come to understand Mark a bit better and to love him.

   --- Reviewed by Cassia Van Arsdale

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