Just Do This One Thing for Me

by Laura Zimmermann Narrated by Jennifer Jill Araya

Overview

Hilarious, heartbreaking, and sneaky suspenseful, Just Do This One Thing for Me is a timely novel about a rule-following daughter trying to hold her family together after her scammer mother disappears.

“Just do this one thing for me.” Drew's mother says it more often than good morning. Heidi Hill has been juggling shady side hustles for all of Drew's seventeen years, and Drew knows that “one thing” really means all the necessary things her mother thinks are boring, including taking care of her fifteen-year-old sister and eight-year-old brother. In fact, Drew is the closest thing to a responsible adult they've ever known. When their mother disappears on the way to a New Year's Eve concert in Mexico and her schemes start unraveling, Drew is faced with a choice: Follow the rules, do the responsible thing, and walk away--alone--from her mother's mess. Or hope the weather stays cold, keep the cons going, and just maybe hold her family together.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/26/2023

Zimmerman (My Eyes Are Up Here) delivers a suspenseful novel about three siblings struggling to stay afloat after their mother’s death. With a boyfriend she only tolerates and an uninvolved father who lives two hours away, 17-year-old Drew can’t wait until she can escape to college. In the meantime, while her unreliable mother is preoccupied with shady side hustles, rule-following Drew serves as the parental figure for her acerbic 15-year-old sister Carna and guileless eight-year-old half-brother Lock. Mom constantly asks Drew to “just do this one thing for me”; this time, she requests that Drew stay home with her siblings while their mother travels from Wisconsin to Mexico to attend a New Year’s Eve Justin Timberlake concert. Things take a grim turn, however, when Drew and Carna discover their mother’s frozen body in the family’s storage shed, and Drew uncovers the depth of her illegal schemes, including receiving Social Security payments for Drew’s dead grandmother. Short chapters sometimes lend to sporadic pacing, but the siblings’ enduring relationship provides a strong through line, while cinematic prose and Drew’s wry first-person voice convey both gruesome and darkly humorous descriptions of the trio’s efforts to stay together. Characters cue as white. Ages 14–up. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

[A] propulsive, heartbreaking account of having to grow up too soon.”—People Magazine

"One of the most humorous, touching novels published this year."—St. Paul Pioneer Press

“A wild ride.” —Minnesota Public Radio

"A witty, off-beat, and strangely charming look at just how far an eldest child will go to keep their younger siblings together. —School Library Journal

"Drew’s bitingly funny, smart, and deceptively vulnerable voice drives this contemporary fiction offering  that delivers madcap comedy, a bit of a mystery, and an engaging family drama.... An often hilarious yet also poignant tale of sibling loyalty." —Kirkus Reviews

“Zimmerman delivers a suspenseful novel about three siblings struggling to stay afloat after their mother’s death. The siblings’ enduring relationship provides a strong through line, while cinematic prose and Drew’s wry first-person voice convey both gruesome and darkly humorous descriptions of the trio’s efforts to stay together.” —Publishers Weekly

An SLJ Best Book of the Year
An Edgar Allan Poe Award Nominee
A Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award

School Library Journal

08/01/2023

Gr 8 Up—Eldest daughter and the most functional member of her household, Drew is used to picking up her mom Heidi's slack for the sake of Carna and Lock, her younger siblings. It's frustrating but not all that surprising when Heidi decides to abscond to Mexico to see a Justin Timberlake concert with little thought of school, food, or any of the other requirements of caring for children. But Heidi never makes it to Mexico, and when Drew and Carna discover her body in the shed, alerting anyone who might force them to be separated is obviously the last resort. The sisters know that time will run out, and their desperate, impossible situation just keeps getting worse as the weather warms up, the federal agent on Heidi's trail for fraud is circling closer and closer, and most frustrating of all, Drew (and her computer) begin to be haunted by Heidi's ghost. The family's income comes from reviewing products online, another job Drew picks up when her mother dies, and the continual inclusion of pieces of these reviews gives buoyancy to a somewhat dark narrative. Drew's boyfriend feels like a bit of an afterthought; the siblings-against-the-world vibes are strong and moments of shared emotion between them are some of the highlights of the story. Though the dead body in the shed may be unrealistic, the universality of teens needing to make adult decisions they are ill-equipped to handle feels exceedingly real. VERDICT A witty, off-beat, and strangely charming look at just how far an eldest child will go to keep their younger siblings together.—Allie Stevens

Kirkus Reviews

2023-06-08
Three siblings go to dramatic lengths to hide their neglectful mother’s disappearance in this comedic novel.

Drew, who is almost 18, is used to the responsibility of caring for Carna, her deeply sarcastic 15-year-old sister, and Lock, her sweet brother who is just 8. She’s been filling in the sizable gaps left by her mom’s irresponsibility since she was in grade school, but even she is challenged when her mom stops responding to texts en route to a Justin Timberlake concert in Mexico. Additionally, though Drew is dedicated to her younger charges, her exit plan after graduation has been in the works for a long time. Drew’s bitingly funny, smart, and deceptively vulnerable voice drives this contemporary fiction offering that delivers madcap comedy, a bit of a mystery, and an engaging family drama. Some secondary characters are more developed than others, and the short, vignette-style chapters feel a little choppy in places, but Drew, Carna, and Lock are an unforgettable trio that readers will wholeheartedly root for despite—and also because of—their realistic problems and human fallibilities. The rural Wisconsin setting of their curmudgeonly father’s lake cabin and the wintry details of Larch Leap, the fictional town they live in, are spot-on, adding an appealing sense of place to this character-driven story. All of the characters seem to be white.

An often hilarious yet also poignant tale of sibling loyalty. (Fiction. 13-18)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178377970
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/22/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER TWO

The thing about being raised (“raised”) by someone like Heidi Hill is that you could end up with a very slippery relationship with the rules (“rules”). Like my sister.

But I am a born rule follower, a truth teller, a doer of homework, and a dotter and crosser of all letters and symbols and punctuation that require dots and crosses. And I don’t dot them with hearts or open circles. Just dots, like they are supposed to be dotted.

I meet deadlines. I set alarms. I make lists. I check them. Twice. I never cheat on anything (or anyone). I don’t round corners. I don’t round up. If it was only twenty-­one hours since I’d had a fever, I would insist on waiting three more before going back to school, even if there was a class party that day.

Case in point, fourth grade:

“Aren’t you getting on the bus?”

“I can’t go until 10:07. That’s when I checked yesterday and I didn’t have a fever anymore. You have to drive me at 10:07.”

“It’s fricking freezing out. I don’t want to wrap up the baby. Just stay home if you don’t want to go.”

“It’s the Valentine’s party!” I held up my sack of valentines: hearts, cut out of Post-it notes, each stuck to a Tootsie Pop. Heidi had not gotten any even though I’d put them on the list, because she hadn’t remembered to take my list. So I’d improvised. I’d written each name in my best writing, double-­checked everyone’s spelling, and added what I thought was an appropriate sticker—dinosaurs for the dinosaur boys, soccer balls for the soccer girls, pencils or books for the ones I wasn’t sure about. “Britelle’s mom is organizing the party.”

Heidi gagged. She gagged whenever Brenda Olziewski or any of the other do-­everything mothers came up.

“Either get on the bus now or bring them in tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?! No one saves valentines for the next day.”

“Then you’d better get moving.”

“It won’t be twenty-­four hours till 10:07.”

“Maybe your fever was already gone at 10:02 but you didn’t take your temperature until 10:07. Or maybe it was 9:41. Did you think about that?”

I hadn’t, but I didn’t think you were supposed to guess about something as important as a fever. The policy was twenty-­four hours.

“If she’s not going, I’m not going,” piped in a perfectly healthy Carna.

I might have gotten over the valentine exchange, but the idea that Carna would miss a day of school for nothing was just too much for me. I tied my scarf around my face to cover my germs during the bus ride, then hid in the school bathroom until ten, checking my head with my arm in case it got hot before I reported to class.

That’s what kind of person I am. Or was, until I couldn’t be anymore.

Before New Year’s Eve, no one would have thought I was capable of doing anything besides exactly what I was supposed to do. And no one, including me, thought I was any good at lying. But maybe it was there in my genes all along, dormant, because once I got started, I caught on quickly.

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