The Steps

by Rachel Cohn

Overview

Twelve-year-old Annabel thought Christmas break was going to be amazing. She'd planned to stay home in New York City with her best friend and do traditional things like go ice-skating in Rockefeller Center, hit the after-Christmas sale at Bloomingdale's, and scream with the TRL crowd at MTV in Times Square. But when her best friend bails, Annabel's mom decides it's high time Annabel visit her father and his new family in Australia.
Annabel is not pleased about traveling around the world to meet "the steps" — twelve-year-old fashion-disaster stepsister, five-year-old stepbrother, and baby half sister — but she's not going to waste this chance to steal her father back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780689874147
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	09/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.62(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	860L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Rachel Cohn is the bestselling author of You Know Where to Find Me, Gingerbread, Shrimp, Cupcake, Pop Princess, and, with David Levithan, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares as well as the tween novels The Steps and Two Steps Forward. Born in Washington, DC, she graduated from Barnard College in New York and has lived on both coasts. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit her at RachelCohn.com.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

If you think it's hard keeping track of all the Steps in my life, try being me.

The Steps are the bazillion stepbrothers, stepsisters, and half siblings my parents keep laying on me. Follow this.

First, there are Angelina and Jack, my parents. I've called my parents by their first names for as long as I can remember. Maybe if they were normal parents who stayed together (or even bothered to get married), or maybe if they had regular day jobs, I would call them Mom and Dad, but that would be, like, so Brady Bunch, and we are so not Brady. Besides, Angelina and Jack were the ones who taught me to call them by their first names. Angelina said Mom was "too uptight a word" for her to hear, and Jack said being called Dad made him feel like an "old coot."

Angelina's an actress and Jack was a comedian. They met when they were both waiters at a hip restaurant in Manhattan. They were "young, dumb, 'n' in love," according to Bubbe, my grandma. They moved in together and had me. I'm Annabel Whoopi Schubert and I'm twelve years old, but I'm "going on thirteen with a vengeance," as Bubbe says.

After Angelina and Jack finished being "young, dumb, 'n' in love," they became yelling and fighting adult folks. After a couple really bad years being miserable all the time, they split up when I was nine.

Then Jack met Penny and moved to Australia to be with her. Penny has a daughter, Lucy, who is the same age as me, and a son, Angus, who's in kindergarten. They call it "kindie" in Australia. Jack thinks it's clever that those people in Australia are always cutting off words and adding ie to them, like noodies for noodles and brekkie for breakfast. I don't think it's clever. I think it's lazy. My baby half sister, Beatrice, who is the daughter of Jack and Penny and also the half sister of Lucy and Angus, will end up talking like that one day. Imagine that, my own blood sister, and she's going to speak with an Australian accent and cut off her words and end them in ie. Please.

Back to Angelina, my mom, who got way too into her role as PTA treasurer and started dating the president of the PTA, Harvey Weideman. Harvey is the divorced father of Wheaties, only the dorkiest kid in the whole seventh grade. I don't even remember Wheaties' real name. That's what we call him at our school, the Progress School on the Upper West Side. Wheaties is short and scrawny and goes around singing folk songs. He's the last boy you'd ever see on a cereal box. Now Angelina's pregnant, and she and Harvey are getting married, so I'm going to have another half sibling and another step. I wonder if I will be the first girl in the world with a stepbrother called Wheaties.

The other step is Lucy and Angus's former stepbrother, Ben. He's not my step technically, so I think it's okay that I kissed him once.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to Christmas break.

It all started because Lucy stole my dad.

Copyright © 2003 by Rachel Cohn

Editorial Reviews

School Library Journal, starred review Laugh-out-loud funny...

Publishers Weekly, starred review Readers will wait with bated breath for Cohn's next novel.

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Author of the highly praised teen novel Gingerbread, Rachel Cohn shifts down to a younger gear with this totally "graayate" page-turner about a New York City girl getting to know her new Aussie stepfamily.

When Annabel's dad (Jack) moves to Australia to live with his new wife (Penny) and her kids (Lucy and Angus), Annabel's only concern is to lure him back home. So when she goes to visit the clan in Sydney, this New York 12-year-old arrives with a serious attitude. Despite the warm hospitality from everyone -- especially 12-year-old Lucy -- nothing Down Under makes the grade, including the relaxed Aussie fashions, the strange food, or the way people speak. Soon, however, Annabel begins to actually have fun with her stepfamily, but after she takes a sneaky, anti-parent escape trip to Melbourne with Lucy, the entire group quickly realizes that uniting as a family -- no matter how disjointed -- is better than staying worlds apart.

With a sassy but thoughtful main character and a tone that keeps the book from getting too message heavy, The Steps is a lighthearted look at nontraditional families that will leave readers feeling sunnier and wiser. Cohn expertly develops her diverse cast so that no one is clichéd or predictable, and readers can even use the cool character flowchart on the book's cover to keep track of who's who. Annabel and her 21st-century family make for one "rip snorter" of a read. Shana Taylor

12-year-old girl travels to Australia to visit her father and his new family with hopes of winning him back. "The author of Gingerbread once again creates a funny and feisty narrator caught in a complicated family situation," wrote PW in a starred review. Ages 8-12. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 5-8-The very with-it musings of Annabel, trying to figure out how to relate to a recently acquired "bazillion" step- and half-siblings with more on the way, are very cheerily portrayed by Caitlin Greer. Her rendition of a near-teen girl comes out perfectly voiced as she reads Rachel Cohn's novel (S&S, 2003). Providing an Australian accent for the down under set of steps proves a challenge, since those parts are quite large, especially the key same-age step Lucy. Greer doesn't miss a beat reading those characters, but the accent doesn't always come off perfectly. The preteen listeners who will find this cheerful and realistic book appealing aren't likely to notice and will appreciate the local color provided in the attempt. This story makes completely obvious the child's desire to be the one and only center of both parents' lives. But it allows the development of a more mature and accepting viewpoint as Annabel realizes that her adored father is a happier, more effectual person in his Sydney home, and that her Australian steps also have their difficulties with this new family arrangement. This character growth happens just in time for Annabel to discover that she will soon have a new set of steps when her mother remarries! This story convincingly portrays the feelings and attitudes of people trying to adjust to new family circumstances. A short contents note on the case tells what chapters are covered on each tape side, a feature that is helpful for coordinating book and tape. This is a fine choice for reluctant as well as more accomplished readers.-Jane P. Fenn, Corning-Painted Post West High School, Painted Post NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

An oh-so-New-York 12-year-old struggles to sort out her relationship within what might be called the ultimate blended family (the front cover has a helpful diagram of all the relationships). Annabel has the sort of relationship with her parents where she calls them by their first names. Even after they split, all was pretty much okay until Jack moved to Australia to marry Penny, become Angus and Lucy’s stepdad--an eventuality that has Annabel seeing red--and father Beatrice. Annabel doesn’t really want to go to Australia over the Christmas break, but she does, hoping somehow to steal her father back. What she discovers, however, is that he’s happier than he ever was and is utterly disinclined to move home, however much he misses her. When Lucy and Annabel, at first enemies but later, convincingly, good friends, sneak off on a trans-Australia train trip, they set into motion a family crisis that brings all members of Annabel’s family to Sydney (including her new stepfather- and stepbrother-to-be; it’s been a busy vacation for her mother, too) in a sort of giant group hug that, however unlikely in the real world, is nevertheless a nicely satisfying way to end the story. It is a relatively predictable tale of raw feelings, jealousy, new friendships, and reconciliation, but it is enlivened both by Annabel’s sassy voice and by the acuity of her observations: "I had . . . never met them, and I knew that in those two years they would have developed a secret family language only they could understand." If there’s rather a lot of parent-to-child explaining about love and relationships, readers can still only hope that their own families can sort themselves out as well as Annabel’s. (Fiction.11-14)

Kirkus Reviews