Just Do This One Thing for Me
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Hilarious, heartbreaking, and sneaky suspenseful, Just Do This One Thing for Me is a timely novel about a rule-following daughter trying to hold her family together after her scammer mother disappears.
“Just do this one thing for me.” Drew's mother says it more often than good morning. Heidi Hill has been juggling shady side hustles for all of Drew’s seventeen years, and Drew knows that “one thing” really means all the necessary things her mother thinks are boring, including taking care of her fifteen-year-old sister and eight-year-old brother. In fact, Drew is the closest thing to a responsible adult they’ve ever known. When their mother disappears on the way to a New Year’s Eve concert in Mexico and her schemes start unraveling, Drew is faced with a choice: Follow the rules, do the responsible thing, and walk away--alone--from her mother's mess. Or hope the weather stays cold, keep the cons going, and just maybe hold her family together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zimmerman (My Eyes Are Up Here) delivers a suspenseful novel about three siblings struggling to stay afloat after their mother's death. With a boyfriend she only tolerates and an uninvolved father who lives two hours away, 17-year-old Drew can't wait until she can escape to college. In the meantime, while her unreliable mother is preoccupied with shady side hustles, rule-following Drew serves as the parental figure for her acerbic 15-year-old sister Carna and guileless eight-year-old half-brother Lock. Mom constantly asks Drew to "just do this one thing for me"; this time, she requests that Drew stay home with her siblings while their mother travels from Wisconsin to Mexico to attend a New Year's Eve Justin Timberlake concert. Things take a grim turn, however, when Drew and Carna discover their mother's frozen body in the family's storage shed, and Drew uncovers the depth of her illegal schemes, including receiving Social Security payments for Drew's dead grandmother. Short chapters sometimes lend to sporadic pacing, but the siblings' enduring relationship provides a strong through line, while cinematic prose and Drew's wry first-person voice convey both gruesome and darkly humorous descriptions of the trio's efforts to stay together. Characters cue as white. Ages 14–up.
