Fourteen-year-old Carmen feels sure she’s never going to live up to her namesake, the heroine of Bizet’s famous opera. She’s not popular; the new boy at school looks right through her as if she were invisible; and she’s totally petrified by her upcoming class presentation. What’s worse is that it’s Valentine’s Day and she can’t think of even a handful of people who really love her! In an utterly impetuous act of rebellion, Carmen decides to run away. Over the course of the day, she shoplifts makeup from a big department store, is filmed by a local TV crew saying what she wants most for Valentine’s Day, meets a hot musician in a local laundromat, and ends up as part of his stage show later that night. In the process, Carmen discovers that there’s a great deal more to herself than she thought. At the end of the evening, she walks back into her old life only to find that while she’s been gone, she really has made more of an impact than she ever imagined.

In Carmen, Carol Frechette has beautifully created a small, safe fictional space in which to explore that real sense of displacement, confusion, and angst that many teens feel as they navigate their way toward adulthood. But Carmen isn’t just about teenage angst – it’s about self-discovery. It delicately asks teen readers to step back from the emotional morass of their lives and take another look at themselves, as Carmen does. The novel also has a rollercoaster plot and a wonderful sense of immediacy that probably stems from Frèchette’s experience as a dramatist. Carmen is able to step back into her world empowered with the feeling that what’s ahead are endless possibilities, not closed doors. That sense helps to make Carmen a powerful, poignant novel that should resonate with teen readers.