Shaunarumbling

Hollywood Nobody, Lisa Samson's first Young Adult novel, introduces Scotty Dawn, a smart and quirky heroine. Scotty is a 15-year-old autodidact who travels around the country to movie sets in a shabby RV with her mother Charley, a food stylist. The book is not divided into chapters but rather time periods, and Samson uses first-person narratives, blog posts and comments, journal entries, and text messages to tell Scotty's story.

Scotty befriends a budding film star and starts an anonymous gossip blog, Hollywood Nobody. She appreciates her learning experiences and the freedom that she enjoys. But Scotty also has many questions about who she is, why she knows nothing about her father, whether there is a God, and why Charley is so secretive about her past even though Scotty is old enough to realize that they are not always on the road because Charley loves the transient lifestyle but because she is running from someone.

It's nice to see a strong novel character who is homeschooled, or roadschooled, as Scotty puts it. Samson successfully portrays the "weird factor" associated with homeschooling and how intimidating it can be to acknowledge to your peers that you homeschool, even when it suits you. She sensitively handles the pressures that Scotty faces as a teen whose unconventional upbringing makes her long for friendship and what she perceives as a normal life, not the least of which is having a home that doesn't move.

Instead of being lured by the drugs and alcohol lifestyle of her teenage peers who are Hollywood somebodies, Scotty rebels by eschewing Charley's vegan restrictions and sneaking cheese into the RV in containers of tofutti and other vegan-approved products. I found the numerous references to Scotty's obsession with cheese a little, well, cheesy, but it adds to her quirkiness. I'm just saying.