Who Says I Can't? by Mary C Ryan    Books by Mary C Ryan · Ghosts, Gadgets and Great Ideas · My Friend O'Connell · Blue Flyers · Helping Ray · Me Two                 >> View all
Category:	Children	Publisher:	Little, Brown & Co.	ISBN-10:	0316763748	Type:
Pages:	159	Copyright:	1988			Fiction

Whether you're a dreamer or a does, you will be entertained by jTessa's turbulent quest for power and personality in this funny and telling novel. Buy your copy! Tessa Talbert has always been more like awilted wallflower than like her mother, Tatiana. When auditions for student director of the high school talent show are announced, Tessa decides to follow in her mother's footsteps for once and try out. That's when the trouble started.

From Publishers Weekly
Tessa is a daydreamer, while her mother is a doera community leader of cultural affairs, who is willing to go all out to direct other people's lives successfully. The class punk, Alan, has been trying to get Tessa's attention, but her friends, pointing to her mother's status in the community, believe that his interest in her is tied to her mother: if Tessa (like mother, like daughter) becomes the student director of the upcoming talent show, Alan's band, Zeb and the Zombies, may have the chance to perform. Tessa takes on the directorship and gives Rodney, an athlete with brains, the chance to do a "sensitive" reading, while excluding Alan. She is blind to Rodney's tactics, which are basically the same as those she believed motivated Alan. By book's end, Tessa has been fired, Alan is her one true love, and Rodney is the creep he set out to be. No surprises from the author of Frankie's Run in this very formulaic teen romance. The most interesting character is Tessa's mother, who does a 180-degree turnaround in the last pages of the booka turn, by the way, that is as poignant as it is unlikely. Ages 12-up.