Kathy Dobie Books

"This is a story of a young girl - the oldest daughter in a Catholic family of six children, with a rebelious older brother, an exhausted mother whose attention Kathy craves, and a glamorous father whom she idolises - struggling to find her proper place in the world. In the spring of her 14th year suddenly 'the earth blossomed with men and boys... they were everywhere', and Kathy sees her path towards power and freedom. Bur girls who break the rules in small towns like hers are expected to pay a high price for their transgressions, and Kathy soon learns the rpice. How she stepped out of that car forever altered, but not forever damaged, and how she learned to fight back after being labelled as a slut, insulted and ostrcised in her own neighbourhood, is also part of her story. Always aware that her ambitions were bigger and more complicated that the suburbs she grew up in, Kathy was determined to come through and to transform her life."

Bookworm and dreamer, Kathy was a young girl with a tender heart, an adventurer’s spirit, and a child’s terrible confusion about her proper place in the world. As the oldest daughter in a family of six children, she seemed trapped in her role as Big Sister and Mommy’s Helper. Then, one day, teetering on the brink of adolescence, hormones surging, she heard someone call her “cheesecake,” and suddenly saw her path. “Cheesecake, jailbait, sex kitten”--the very words seemed to be “doors opening” to a splendid new self. But from the moment she decides to lose her virginity and reels in her prey, a “full-grown man,” fourteen-year-old Kathy is headed for trouble. One cold, raw March night some months later, parked in a car with four boys on the outskirts of her small suburban town, she finds it. Though she could never have foreseen the outcome of that night, the “boys in the car could just as well have been Gypsies foretelling my future,” she writes. Girls who break the rules in small towns like the one she lived in are expected to pay a very high price for their transgressions--and she did. And yet...this young girl, as scrappy a protagonist as any in our literature, manages to transform her fate. The story of how she came to be in that car, and how she stepped out of it forever altered, to be sure, yet not forever damaged, is the theme of this extraordinary coming-of-age tale.