When JFK Was My Father

Georgia Hughes, a 13-year-old American, lives in Rio de Janeiro with her banker father and snobbish mother. On a Christmas vacation, the girl meets poetic Tim, a fellow loner, who kisses her at midnight on New Year's Eve, 1963, and then disappears. Soon thereafter, Georgia's father takes up with a Brazilian woman in Rio while her mother moves back to the States and ships her daughter off to a second-rate boarding school. Georgia begins to fantasize that she is President Kennedy's daughter and communicates with him via letters she writes in a journal and through imaginary conversations in which he offers both reassurance and bizarre bits of information (e.g., that her school is a cover for a Cuban gun-running operation); she also ""receives"" surprisingly sound advice from Mrs. Beard, the long-dead founder of the school. Georgia, who also narrates, accepts these voices as authentic, and the novel ends without resolving the nature of the various communiqu s. In some ways, Gordon's (Midnight Magic) prose is strong--for all the hazy workings of the protagonist's mind, Georgia has charisma, and the settings are unusually solid. But given an unconvincing and cliched supporting cast, an implausible plot (Georgia ends up hiding on school grounds for several days with Tim, who has run away from a neighboring school she had no idea he attended) and the lack of resolution, the novel falls far short of its potential. Ages 10-14. (Apr.)