"How to Ditch Your Fairy" by Justine Larbalestier

How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier

This is one of those hard to categorize books. It's definitely YA and definitely fiction, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. I'll go with fantasy, but it's not really fantasy either. It's set in a fictional city called New Avalon where people have invisible fairies giving them "luck" in certain aspects of life (good hair fairy, shopping fairy, loose change fairy, you name it, there's probably a fairy for it).

Charlie has a parking fairy, and she has since birth. Her mom discovered it when she was a few months old; whenever she had Charlie in the car, there was always a perfect parking space to be found, no matter how hard it usually is to find one. Although many would love to have a parking fairy, Charlie hates it. She can't even drive yet. So in an effort to get rid of her parking fairy, she decides to deprive it of any chance of giving her parking luck by walking everywhere.

Unfortunately, this decision to walk everywhere ends up getting her in a lot of trouble at New Avalon Sports High School. She's late all the time which earns her demerits. Once she gets a certain number of demerits, she starts being benched for her games, so she starts doing community service to get rid of the demerits, but that causes her to lose sleep and thus a vicious cycle begins of demerits and community service.

Add to the mix a really cute new boy in school that she likes, who seems to like her back when they're alone, but at school, he's attached to the hip with Fiorenze, a girl with a "boys-her-age-are-all-attracted-to-her" fairy. Turns out, Fiorenze hates her fairy too, so she and Charlie team up to get rid of their fairies. All of this in between full school days, after-school community service, and trying to avoid being kidnapped for her parking abilities!

Overall, it was a cute and funny book.