When I Grow Up...

Guess what Melina Marchetta wrote about in this book, Saving Francesca? Italian people living in Australia. I suspect this is because she is Italian and lives in Australia and she's one of those authors who writes based on what she knows/can relate to.
But I bet HER mother didn't get really depressed, like Francesca's did. And this is big for Francesca, because her mom is the type who's always in her business and always giving pep talks and playing inspiration music when Francesca wakes up at 6 in the morning. You know? So when her mother, Mia, goes on a huge CRASH Francesca and family (Dad and little brother Luca, named after the Suzanne Vega song!) have no idea how to deal with it.
That's the main problem Francesca has, or one of them. The other one is where she now goes to a formerly all-boys school. It almost still is all-boys, except there are about 30 girls now in this huge school. And what's worse, Francesca only knows three others because they're the only ones who went to her old school. These four girls (Siobhan, Tara, Justine, and Francesca) are stuck at St. Sebastian's Formerly All-Boys School *insert evil music here*. What are they gonna do?
Well, Tara's the rebel fighting for every cause, and now she's mainly fighting to get equal rights in the school for both genders. Justine was always the band geek at the old school, and she still is, just now Francesca finds this other dimension to her that she never knew she had. Siobhan is... Siobhan. You'll see what I mean. And Francesca doesn't know who she is.
Francesca also starts to reach out to the guys. She meets: Will, the control-freak senior who randomly falls in love with her... and back out of love again, Jimmy, the bully who intimidates by talking to people and catching them off guard, and Thomas, the loud, crude, prankster who is cracking fart jokes half the time.
All of these characters come together for a really good tapestry of a story.
And the reason this post is called When I Grow Up is not because that song by the Pussycat Dolls is really good (although it kind of is, if you listen to it long enough). It's called that because every once and a while, when a new character helps Francesca somehow, like when the cop takes her home (don't ask) or when her teacher starts having therapy sessions with her (long story), she says, "When I grow up I want to be a teacher." Or "When I grow up I want to be a police officer." You get the point. But towards the end of the story, when everything starts falling together she says "When I grow up I want to be my mother." That to me was one of the best lines in the