Pumkinheads is pretty good on those grounds, though. It does all take place in one long evening, and could more-or-less fit into the four or five hours available. The cheating is more about what happens, so the reader just has to assume the management of DeKnock's World Famous Pumpkin Patch & Autumn Jamboree either somehow failed to noticed our two protagonists walked off the job at the beginning of the night or just couldn't find them amid all of the other hijinks.
But I seem to have gotten ahead of myself.
Josiah and Deja are friends and co-workers at the Pumpkin Patch, seniors in their last fall working there. They've worked as a team at the Succotash Hut for four years, and Josiah has been MVPPP (Most Valuable Pumpkin Patch Person) four of the last five possible months. But today is the very last night of this season. Josiah has been mooning over someone he calls The Fudge Girl -- she works at the Fudge Shoppe -- so Deja has switched them to work in the Pie Palace, right across the way, and is pushing Josiah to finally walk over and actually talk to this girl he's been obsessing about for much longer than could ever be healthy.
Deja is the outgoing, friendly, pushy one -- I don't know if every friendship has a person like that, but fictional friendship stories need someone like that, or there's not much of a story.
So Deja pushes Josiah, and he runs over on their dinner break (pretty early in the evening) to say hi to Marcy (Fudge Girl's name is Marcy), but finds that she got moved elsewhere in the Patch that evening.
Josiah would be willing to drop it, and spend the rest of this last evening selling pies, but Deja definitely will not. So they're off on an odyssey across almost all of the locations mapped out on the endpapers. (They, sadly, never make it into the Haunted Hacienda, and that's the only spoiler I'll give.)
This does mean dodging what seems to be at least the back half of their shift, but you only have one last night at the patch, right?
Do they find The Fudge Girl? Does Josiah pledge his undying love to a person he's never actually talked to? Well, maybe.
Do they spend a lot of time together, and talk more than they probably did while working? Definitely. Does that lead to interesting places? Of course it does.
And do I mean "interesting places" like the Freeto Pie Stop and the Corn Maze, or "interesting places" in their relationship? Well, can't it be both?
Pumpkinheads is sweet and fun and bouncy, propelled by punchy, teenager-appropriate dialogue and Deja's boundless energy and drive. Writer Rainbow Rowell clearly knows teenagers -- she's a noted YA writer, but this is the first time I've ever read her work. Artist Faith Erin Hicks -- whose work I'm more familiar with -- keeps it all real and grounded and gives a great sense of the physical layout of this place.
This is one of those books that's primarily for teenagers, but at least as much for anyone who can remember being a teenager. It's real and funny and frothy, not quite a romance but a little more than a story about friends. We all need stories like that once in a while, so grab this one of those days.
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