Labor of Love

While I don't think this is her best work, I enjoyed Rachel Hawthorne's teen romance "Labor of Love" which was about teenagers helping rebuild houses in New Orleans post hurricanes. In the Author's Note at the back, Rachel explains that she got the idea for the novel while attening the ALA conference in June 2006, when she was out to dinner and observed a table of teenagers who were in town to volunteer. The main shortcomings of this book were that the rebuilding efforts did not seem believable or well researched compared to other similar books I have read (Dana Reinhardt's "How to Build a House" for example) and that the plot replied on a psychic to help the characters address their feelings, and that is a personal annoyance for me as a reader, especially when the psychic is not later debunked, etc.
298 pages.