Dressing up as an eighteenth century farm girl is not how Betsy Odell imagined spending the summer before her senior year of high school, but her history professor father insists she take a job at Morrisville Historic Village. To make matters worse, Liza Murphy, only the biggest freak from school — piercings, tattoos, bleached hair — works as a farm girl too. As far as Betsy can tell, her summer will be miserable and any chance of ever being popular is doomed.

When tragedy strikes Betsy close to home, her boyfriend and 'friends' are nowhere to be found, and her job becomes a welcome escape from the real world. James, a Morrisville employee from the next town over, is probably the greatest — not to mention cutest — guy Betsy has ever met, and Liza is surprisingly normal and fun. Caught between two worlds — old and new — Betsy is soon struggling with two versions of herself. Combining backdrops of historic Morrisville with the normal teenage world of beach parties, learning to drive, and broken hearts, Tara Altebrando writes a hilarious and fun novel of one girl's search for love and happiness?and the unlikely places she finds them.

"A dreamlike evocation of friendship and romance, and how tragedy can be transformed into art. Like Sarah Dessen's The Truth About Forever, The Pursuit of Happiness deals insightfully with love and loss."

-- Alex McAulay, author of Bad Girls

These are the real five stages of grief: agitation, intoxication, experimentation, resignation, and reinvigoration.

Betsy knows that her summer job at a colonial village is going to ruin whatever slim chance she has of ever being popular. To make matters worse, Liza Henske, only the biggest freak from school — piercings, tattoos, you name it — works at the village, too. But when Betsy's mother dies, playing farm girl starts to feel like a great escape...from her shattered family, from the boyfriend who dumps her, from the friend group that goes poof.

Fortunately, Liza turns out not to be such a freak after all. And James — a lanky surfer who works at the village — has started carving Betsy things out of wood. Being with him is the only thing that makes her feel normal these days. That, and cutting images out of black paper like colonial silhouette artists did, which she knows must seem strange, but life seems very black and white lately...except for things with James, which are a million shades of gray.

Reeling from her mother's death, an aimless 21st-century teen working at a historic village discovers new friends, new loves, and the courage to forge her own path.

Tara Altebrando also writes adult fiction for Downtown Press as Tara McCarthy. Her work has appeared in magazines, including Seventeen and Mademoiselle.