What is Sarah Benjamin doing in a stuffy Christian stronghold like Stuart Hall, Indianapolis's most exclusive girls’ school? Playing a shepherd, that's what, in the school's annual Christmas pageant. Even worse, Sarah knows (based on the results or her Angel Perception Analysis), that she, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, self-proclaimed assimilated Jew, is only a shepherd by default.
Sarah's story opens on the eve of the 1960 presidential election, with Sarah in trouble as one of only three Kennedy supporters in the entire school. It spans three stormy, hilarious years from eighth grade to eleventh - and four pageants. Between the pageants are months of boredom punctuated by disasters great and small. Sarah loses her beloved sister to college and her best friend to a boy. She suffers the invasion of her flamboyant Aunt Hattie, manager of a motley assortment of performing artists, who comes to the Benjamins to recover from surgery and stays and stays. She braves a blizzard to rescue a stranded, pregnant Rumanian violinist and is pawed by a preppie prince Through it all, she rails against stultifying Stuart Hall, a bastion of Conservatism with rules for everything from the color of your socks to eating Oreos. Finally, Sarah revolts and, clad in her shepherd's costume, charges headlong into the New Frontier.
In Pageant, Kathryn Lasky returns to the autobiographical territory of her first novel, The Night Journey While her heroine may suffer boredom and adolescent angst, her readers will be hugely entertained-and deeply moved-by this trenchant, uproarious account of the coming-of-age of Sarah Benjamin.
AN ALA BEST BOOK FOR YOUNG ADULTS