The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega.

Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. YA)Ī Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart. Although she sets her story in the ’60s counterculture, today’s readers will find no generation gap when it comes to Mary Margaret’s questioning of friends, family and religion and her pressures and experimentation with sex, drugs and rock-’n’-roll. A previous author of middle-grade novels, O’Dell makes a fab entrée into the world of YA literature. But when Mary Margaret tries to save Jane from a fateful trip with a bad ticket, she wonders if simply following your heart is the real path to peace and love. While Jane searches for love every weekend at the hippie-filled Rainbow House, Mary Margaret wants to revolutionize love (“ no boyfriend bullshit”) with her long-time crush and polio-stricken Mitchell Dunn. Having abandoned Elizabeth, her pious, childhood best friend with a brother in Vietnam, for Jane, an adventurous partier, Mary Margaret is ready to find a “ticket,” a guy who will take her somewhere in life.

“Everything normal makes me sick,” espouses Catholic high-schooler Mary Margaret Hallinan during the Summer of Love of 1967.

Bad Tickets by Kathleen O'Dell