Scrambled Eggs at Midnight

By Brad Barkley & Heather Hepler

Published in 2006 by Speak, New York.

This story is told in alternating viewpoints, moving back and forth between Cal (short for Calliope) and Eliot. Both are fifteen years old, at odds with their parents, and - within a few chapters - deeply in love. Eliot's father runs a Christian weight-loss camp, while Cal's mother has been trekking across the country, from Rennaissance fair to Rennaissance fair (say that ten times fast), selling her jewellery and working as a bar wench. This transitive lifestyle seems to doom the blossoming romance between Eliot and Cal, but a (slightly unbelievable) happy ending means that the couple will live happily ever after, or at least until the next school year. While the ending rings a little false, the rest of the book rises above the dreck that marks much "teen romance." It is pointed out more than once that Eliot (with one L) shares his name with the poet, Thomas Stearns. This is fitting, because the book is surprisingly well written, and full of passages that capture the heady thrill of falling in love, first touches, first kisses, and so on (but not too far, mom).

Falling.

I feel it, like she's the white hole, she's the light, and I can just let myself fall into her, tumbling like an astronaut whose safety cord is tied only to a voice that says, wait, wait, wait. My voice saying it, inside me. Wait, because yeah, the guy in space is weightless and it looks so beautiful and it is, but the guy who falls out of a plane, the guy whose parachute fails? He's weightless too. Most people don't know that, but I also learned that in physics last year, that falling people are weightless, which is why you see skydivers doing flips in the air. And they are weightless for the whole drop, up until the point that htey hit the ground, and without a parachute they get their full weight back right then, on impact, times a thousand. It crushes them, and that's how falling people die, crushed by nothing more than themselves.

Falling can do that too. It's not all pretty. Not all a dream. (84-85)

Scrambled Eggs at Midnight is a really lovely story and book. It is smart, funny, and light without being paper thin. A good modern love story. Beats the pants off of most of the romances I read in high school.

7.5/10.

Ages 12-16.