I'm Locker 145, Who Are You?

Susan Rogers was a librarian with the Laurenval School Board (Adult Services), Deux Montagnes, Quebec.

Jodi Quinn answers a note written on her desk top and finds herself involved with a reform school graduate. Confused and angry about her own family life (her parents are undergoing a trial separation), Jodi has difficulty overcoming her fears of forming a friendship with a boy who has made mistakes in his past.

The beginning of the story is promising. How will Jodi discover the identity of the note-writer? Will he be the man of her dreams? However, the reader soon loses patience with Jodi’s fears of befriending Mike. Jodi states that she is afraid of getting into trouble with her parents, but her grandmother, mother, and father have all met Mike and liked him. Jodi’s friend Brenda is much more willing to help, and it would seem more logical for Mike to be interested in her. (However, Brenda is fat and Jodi is physically attractive.) The author hammers home the point that Jodi’s refusal to trust Mike is identical with her mother’s condemnation of her father for his mistake in their marriage.

Teenage girls may go through a period of being completely self-centered, but the author fails to create any spark in Jodi that the reader can like. Jodi changes in the end, but by this time the reader doesn’t really care.