Beth Ann Bauman

A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A Booklist Top 10 First Novel for Youth
A Booklist Top 10 Romance Fiction for Youth
A Booklist Editors’ Choice
A New Voices Pick by the Association of Booksellers for Children

It’s off-season at the Jersey shore. The boardwalk belongs to the locals–including Rosie and Skate, sisters who are a year apart in age but couldn’t be more different. Rosie’s fifteen, shy, and waiting for her life to begin. Skate, sixteen, is tougher and knows what she wants. Rosie still believes in their widowed father, a likable drunk, who is spending a few months in jail for petty theft. Skate thinks he’s hopeless and nicknames him the Old Crow, after the whiskey he drinks. Rosie wants to experience her first love and is drawn to Nick, a boy in her support group. Skate and her boyfriend, Perry, are madly in love–inseparable. But this fall Perry goes off to college, leaving Skate behind.

There’s no Dad. No Mom. Just their home, a falling-down Victorian on the beach, with a cousin to look after them. Ultimately, Rosie and Skate must count on each other.

“A perfect read for teens….A charmer from start to finish…Rosie and Skate is so rooted in place you can almost smell the sea and the saltwater taffy as you turn the pages….Humor and sorrow travel hand in hand here.  Bauman builds her story on the old-fashioned brick and mortar of character and place, and she does it beautifully, deftly, and without a single false step.” —The Boston Globe 

“The novel expertly captures the ever-hopeful ache of adolescents longing for love, stability, and certainty.”   —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“This is a novel as brisk and refreshing as an ocean breeze.”  —Booklist, Starred Review

“In capturing the miscues of first love and shifting family dynamics, Rosie and Skate is as sharp as a splinter on the boardwalk.” —New York Times Book Review