Judy Blundell, STRINGS ATTACHED

Another very good, beautifully written YA novel from the writer of WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED, with the same sort of high stakes and rich emotion. 17-year-old Kit Corrigan from Providence goes to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer and actress. Providence and New York are linked through her--because she connects Billy Benedict, the angry boy she loves, with his father Nate, who is a mob lawyer and longs to make amends by giving Kit an apartment in New York when she desperately needs it (though there are "strings attached"), with her father who once was Nate's bootlegging partner, and with her aunt Delia who was once Nate's mistress in that very apartment. Her past is full of lies and bribes, deaths and sudden disappearances that she doesn't know about or understand, and this book slowly unwinds that past until she does.