College Roommates Research Articles

Predicting change in relationship insecurity: The roles of compassionate and self‐image goals

AbstractIt was hypothesized that self‐image goals to construct, defend, and maintain desired images of the self enhance relationship insecurity, whereas compassionate goals to support others diminish relationship insecurity. Study 1 followed 115 new college roommates for 3 weeks; Study 2 followed 230 new college roommates across a semester. Both studies assessed self‐image and compassionate goals for and anxiety and avoidance in the roommate relationship. Self‐image goals predicted increased relationship anxiety and avoidance across 3 weeks (Study 1) and within weeks, from week to week, and across 3 months (Study 2). Compassionate goals consistently predicted decreased relationship anxiety and avoidance across studies and analyses. These results suggest that through their interpersonal goals, people contribute directly to their own relationship insecurity.

SOCIAL CONTAGION OF MENTAL HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM COLLEGE ROOMMATES

From a policy standpoint, the spread of health conditions in social networks is important to quantify, because it implies externalities and possible market failures in the consumption of health interventions. Recent studies conclude that happiness and depression may be highly contagious across social ties. The results may be biased, however, because of selection and common shocks. We provide unbiased estimates by using exogenous variation from college roommate assignments. Our findings are consistent with no significant overall contagion of mental health and no more than small contagion effects for specific mental health measures, with no evidence for happiness contagion and modest evidence for anxiety and depression contagion. The weakness of the contagion effects cannot be explained by avoidance of roommates with poor mental health or by generally low social contact among roommates. We also find that similarity of baseline mental health predicts the closeness of roommate relationships, which highlights the potential for selection biases in studies of peer effects that do not have a clearly exogenous source of variation. Overall, our results suggest that mental health contagion is lower, or at least more context specific, than implied by the recent studies in the medical literature.

A Dialectical Approach to Rethinking Roommate Relationships

Previous research on the complex interplay between roommate factors and relational satisfaction has offered contradictory findings. This study establishes a typology that accounts for relational satisfaction among first-year college roommates. Drawing from the theoretical framework of Interactional Dialectics and the ideal hypothesis, three roommate types were proposed and analyzed. The results suggest that individuals who share the same roommate type report higher levels of relational satisfaction. Furthermore, this study found that smaller discrepancies between individuals' ideal and actual roommate relationships yielded higher levels of relational satisfaction. Implications and directions for future research on roommate relationships are discussed.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

wltreviews often the case, the adventure begins with a telephone call, as Kati hears from her old college roommate, Petra Vogel, a B-grade German movie star who is traveling to Istanbul to shoot a film. Petra and Kati meet to catch up in Petra’s decadent hotel suite, where Kati learns about a family tragedy Petra has endured since the two lost touch. When Kurt Müller, the director of Petra’s film, is murdered in his hotel room, Kati takes it upon herself to solve the murder and remove her troubled friend from the list of suspects. First published in Turkish in 2001, Aykol’s novel explores European stereotypes and prejudices. Aykol puts particular emphasis on the relationship between Germans and Turks, and feelings of cultural superiority. Kati, having lived for extended periods of time in both Germany and Turkey , serves as a moderator of sorts, agreeing when a German henchman comments, “The class differences here are very marked. We Germans are much more like each other.” But she also pokes fun at Germans, noting, “In Istanbul, the only place I ever see such a dowdy lot of people is at the airport when boarding a plane to Berlin.” Though heavy-handed at times, Aykol’s cultural commentaries are perhaps the most successful elements of her novel. The story has all the trappings of an exciting murder mystery, as Kati encounters celebrities, detectives , and gang leaders, but it fails to deliver much suspense. Despite certain redeeming moments of insight into intercultural relations, as a mystery novel, Hotel Bosphorus lacks a gripping hook. Kati sets out to solve Müller’s murder in part to help her friend, and in part out of an eagerness to become a real-life participant in the action she has spent years reading about in fiction. Unfortunately , neither reason is particularly compelling to the reader. Important characters come and go with minimal development, and the amazing good fortune Kati has in stumbling upon vital information gives the reader little reason to credit her intelligence or perseverance. However, despite the novel’s deficiencies in subtlety and plot, Hotel Bosphorus provides an interesting depiction of Istanbul from the point of view of its generally likable heroine, whose adventures continue in two more novels not yet translated into English. Hilary Hudson University of Oklahoma Julian Barnes. The Sense of an Ending . New York. Knopf. 2011. isbn 9780307957122 When it comes to contemporary British fiction, I’ve always been more of a Martin Amis man than a Julian Barnes one. However, after reading Barnes’s latest Man Booker Prize winner , A Sense of an Ending, all that has changed. After reading this little treasure of a book, I have come to realize that I was missing the subtlety and grace of Barnes’s prose. Where Amis may be more clever, and his prose more cutting, Barnes asks more of his reader, but again, more subtly, in more of an understated way. In a sense, Barnes’s latest novel is like a very good single malt scotch, where Amis has always been more of a beer. A Sense of an Ending is a short book, perhaps best read in one sitting , and preferably with that scotch. It is a novel about late middle age that is, I suspect, written for those approaching that time in their lives. The novel, written in two parts, tells a story about Anthony (Tony) Webster, perhaps the most boring and least likable protagonist in years. Part 1 recounts Webster’s younger years and his friendship with two boys his age. When a third boy, Adrian Finn, walks into their lives, they are immediately taken with him. Throughout these recounted episodes, Webster begins dating Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford, a young woman who may or may not be stringing him along. The first part ends with the suicide of Adrian. The second part of the novel takes place many years later, with Webster divorced from his wife, Margaret , and in retirement. When he receives a mysterious letter from a lawyer informing him that Veronica’s mother has left him five hundred pounds and Adrian’s diary in her will, his past suddenly comes creeping back...

Hard Things

21 ELISE JUSKA HARD THINGS L ately George noticed that Vicky talked a lot about the strangeness of time. Things that happened years ago but were still vivid and detailed, things that happened only last month but felt far away. How moving her things into George’s house— nicking her dresser on the doorjamb, deciding whose plates to use and whose to store—felt like yesterday. How at the same time, it felt like they’d lived here forever. George disliked these conversations. They seemed to go nowhere , looking at the phenomenon through this lens or that one, as if it might yield some conclusion. There were no conclusions . Time felt strange; lots of things did. But Vicky liked to talk in abstractions, to analyze things. Once, in the beginning, she said, “Sometimes I kind of wish you said more.” It was the year she was still living in Boston and they were visiting each other on weekends. They had just left the movies in Ellsworth, and it was a forty-minute drive back to George’s house. Longer , in winter. Early March, and the Maine air was brittle with cold. The roads were pitch-black and icy, more dangerous than George let on. He’d been driving in rough weather his whole life; he enjoyed it. But Vicky got nervous about these things. “I mean, I just wonder what you think,” Vicky said. She was hunched forward, holding her knuckles against the vents. George watched the road, high beams splashing over the dark trees and tires jouncing over the potholes. She was saying something about how she believed the main character, but the ending was a stretch. Then she was quiet. A car approached, and George flicked the high beams off. “When I go to the movies, I kind of like to discuss it after,” Vicky said. “But I guess you’re not a discusser.” It would become a familiar feeling, disappointing her. “I guess not,” George said, flicking the beams back on. The car skidded a little, and Vicky pressed the dashboard with one hand. —— colorado review 22 Allison Pearson, Vicky’s college roommate, was coming to visit for the weekend. She lived in New York City and was having problems in her marriage and needed to get away. It wasn’t the first time someone had seen George and Vicky’s life as an escape. And there was something to it, George thought. He would swear, driving back from Boston, he could tell with his eyes closed the minute his truck crossed the state line. The air changed. Some pressure lifted from his chest as he drove up the Maine Turnpike, the rest of the world disappearing behind him like an ice floe cracking off and drifting away. When guests came, George and Vicky could deliver on this image. In the summer, their coastal town came alive with puttering lobster boats and roadside stands selling ice cream and onion rings. People didn’t usually choose to visit in February, but Allison thought it sounded “cozy.” And it was, George agreed, though maintaining it wasn’t easy. The woodstove, for instance, required constant tending—keeping the wood chopped and dry, the kindling replenished, the ash can emptied. With Allison coming, there were matters of comforters and the frigid back bedroom George usually kept closed off with a thick wool blanket to save on heat. Vicky didn’t like the blanket—“I just want this to feel like a house,” she’d murmured when George nailed it to the doorway—but in December, she’d agreed to stretch sheets of thin plastic over all the windows and seal them with her hair dryer. Vicky had gone over the plastic for hours, aiming the dryer like a blowtorch, trying to smooth every wrinkle. She didn’t want it to look like there was plastic there at all. “It’s not possible, honey,” George had said, squeezing her shoulder. “It is here,” she said, pressing her finger to the picture on the front of the box. George was trying his best to keep Vicky happy; he was, technically , the reason she was here. They’d met the August before Some pressure...

Hotel Bosphorus by Esmahan Aykol

fiction Fadhil al-Azzawi. The Traveler and the Innkeeper. William M. Hutchins, tr. Cairo. The American University in Cairo Press (Oxford University Press, distr.). 2011. isbn 9789774164620 Fadhil al-Azzawi (b. 1940), an Iraqi author of several novels and poetry collections, has lived in Germany since 1977. The Traveler and the Innkeeper , written in 1976 and published in Arabic in Germany in 1989, is now elegantly rendered into English by well-known translator William M. Hutchins, who has previously translated al-Azzawi’s novels as well as several works of Arabic fiction, including Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. Originally published in Arabic as Madina min Ramad (Ash city), this novel of is the grim story of an Iraqi secret police inspector in 1960s Baghdad , when the Baathists were rising to power and employed the state apparatus to subdue their opponents, especially the Communists. Inspector Qasim Husayn is in charge of interrogating Jalil Mahmud, his childhood friend, who is a journalist arrested for suspected links to subversives. Torture being part of the interrogation techniques, Qasim considers himself to be protecting society from anarchy. But no measure of torture succeeds in making Jalil confess to anything but his innocence. In the meantime, Qasim falls in love with Huda Abdul-Qadir, Jalil’s wife, whom he visited occasionally to reassure her of her husband’s condition . She originally initiated this affair but gradually abandons it. This increases Qasim’s disillusionment with life, especially when he is temporarily suspended from his job after his inability to make Jalil confess and his superiors learned of his love affair. While portraying the evils of the dictatorial police state, whose prisons al-Azzawi personally experienced in 1963 as a university student, he shows that both the torturing interrogator and his victim destroy each other. His lyrical descriptions of Baghdad localities and streets as well as his narrative of a love affair do not diminish the foreboding atmosphere of the novel, which opposes repression while it attempts to understand the foibles of human beings. Issa J. Boullata Montréal Esmahan Aykol. Hotel Bosphorus. Ruth Whitehouse, tr. London. Bitter Lemon. 2011. isbn 9781904738688 Kati Hirschel is the owner of the only bookshop in Istanbul dedicated to selling crime fiction. Middle-aged, energetic, and self-assured, Hirschel serves as the narrator and protagonist of Esmahan Aykol’s debut novel, Hotel Bosphorus. By maneuvering her way into the role of detective in a murder investigation, Hirschel is given the opportunity to escape the frustrations of quotidian life. As is so Sergio Chejfec’s landscape of memory. Fiction, page 59 Toon Tellegen’s poetic somersaults. Verse, page 74 Judith Schalansky’s love of maps. Miscellaneous, page 78 review world literature in January–February 2012 | 55 wltreviews often the case, the adventure begins with a telephone call, as Kati hears from her old college roommate, Petra Vogel, a B-grade German movie star who is traveling to Istanbul to shoot a film. Petra and Kati meet to catch up in Petra’s decadent hotel suite, where Kati learns about a family tragedy Petra has endured since the two lost touch. When Kurt Müller, the director of Petra’s film, is murdered in his hotel room, Kati takes it upon herself to solve the murder and remove her troubled friend from the list of suspects. First published in Turkish in 2001, Aykol’s novel explores European stereotypes and prejudices. Aykol puts particular emphasis on the relationship between Germans and Turks, and feelings of cultural superiority. Kati, having lived for extended periods of time in both Germany and Turkey , serves as a moderator of sorts, agreeing when a German henchman comments, “The class differences here are very marked. We Germans are much more like each other.” But she also pokes fun at Germans, noting, “In Istanbul, the only place I ever see such a dowdy lot of people is at the airport when boarding a plane to Berlin.” Though heavy-handed at times, Aykol’s cultural commentaries are perhaps the most successful elements of her novel. The story has all the trappings of an exciting murder mystery, as Kati encounters celebrities, detectives , and gang leaders, but it fails to deliver much suspense...

Phonetic convergence in college roommates

Previous studies have found that talkers converge or diverge in phonetic form during a single conversational session or as a result of long-term exposure to a particular linguistic environment. In the current study, five pairs of previously unacquainted male roommates were recorded at four time intervals during the academic year. Phonetic convergence over time was assessed using a perceptual similarity test and measures of vowel spectra. There were distinct patterns of phonetic convergence during the academic year across roommate pairs, and perceptual detection of convergence varied for different linguistic items. In addition, phonetic convergence correlated moderately with roommates' self-reported closeness. These findings suggest that phonetic convergence in college roommates is variable and moderately related to the strength of a relationship.

Relationship Suggestions from Self-Help Books: Gender Stereotyping, Preferences, and Context Effects

Popular books on heterosexual relationships often present gender-dichotomized views of behavior. To test predictions derived from gender schema and social role theories, relationship suggestions from Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (Gray, 1992) were presented in masculine, feminine and neutral versions to 355 undergraduate students in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Participants either made descriptive stereotyping ratings or indicated their own preferences for the relationship suggestions. Half of each group was asked to respond as if the relationship in question was a romantic one, and half for a college roommate. When making descriptive stereotyping ratings, participant responses were in the stereotypic direction but with the means all close to the neutral midpoint. When making preference ratings, both women and men preferred neutral versions of the items over masculine and feminine versions, and women liked all types of items more than did men, but the average ratings indicated general appreciation for the items. Participants also liked the items better if the relationship was with a romantic partner rather than a college roommate. The highly positive reactions of all participants to all types of items and the failure to find consistent patterns of gender-stereotypic responses across rating methods and relationship contexts suggest that gender differences in relationship preferences may be less dramatic than portrayed in popular books. It is argued, however, that such books can impact readers’ perceptions of gender and relationships.

Interpersonal goals, others' regard for the self, and self‐esteem: The paradoxical consequences of self‐image and compassionate goals

AbstractPeople often adopt self‐image goals to increase others' regard for them and perhaps their own self‐esteem. But do these impression management goals achieve their intended result in close relationships? And do they endure over time? We suggest that self‐image goals predict decreased self‐esteem and close others' regard for the self through decreased responsiveness to others. In contrast, compassionate goals, which reflect a genuine concern for others' well‐being, predict increased self‐esteem and others' regard through increased responsiveness. We tested these hypotheses in a longitudinal study of college roommates followed across a semester. Path analyses supported both predictions, suggesting a paradox for interpersonal goals in close relationships: explicit attempts to increase close others' regard for the self backfire and damage self‐esteem, but having goals to meet others' needs result in others' positive regard and promote self‐esteem. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Order Matters: Using the 5E Model to Align Teaching with How People Learn

“I have to teach someone to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How am I supposed to do that? What should I start with? How can this be so hard?” I have found that teaching anything to another person is rife with far more decisions and dilemmas than I could have ever imagined at first. Years ago, I had a college roommate who wanted to participate in a summer teaching program. For her interview, she had to develop a lesson plan to teach someone else how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Have you ever thought about teaching someone else how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? She had asked for my input, and once we started to really consider the possibilities, our minds reeled. How would you start? What would you do first? Next? After that? Who was the learner anyway? And had they made a sandwich before? Were they allergic to peanuts? How old were they? Should we let them have a knife? Should we show them how first? Talk them through it? Let them have a go at it on their own? Should we first teach them the names of all the tools and things we were going to use? Should we ask them why they needed to learn how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the first place? What were the critical issues in teaching someone how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Much like in the “PBJ Dilemma” as we came to call it, there are many decisions to be made in designing effective learning experiences in undergraduate biology classes—and instructors are making these decisions constantly. It can seem overwhelming, yet the research literatures from cognitive science, psychology, and science education about how people learn suggest guidelines about constructing effective learning experiences (National Research Council [NRC], 1999 ). Much like the PBJ Dilemma, the order in which we decide to do things with students when we teach is critical, yet the order of things happening in a class session often goes undiscussed and unexamined. At first glance, the most pressing teaching dilemmas in our biology classrooms—student motivation, student retention of information, student understanding of difficult concepts—may seem unrelated to the order in which things are happening; however, what we do first, second, third, and so on can have many ramifications. For many instructors who have primarily learned from and used a lecture-based teaching approach, considerations of order have been primarily about the order of ideas. With the increasing use of active-learning strategies, class sessions are moving from having a single component—a lecture—to having many components over the course of even 50 minutes (e.g., a video clip, a pair discussion on a biology-based problem, a clicker question, a mini-lecture, and a final index card reflection). So, what is the optimal order for sequencing these elements to maximize student learning of biology?

From Normal Conflict to Normative Deviance: The Micro-Politics of Trouble in Close Relationships

When people experience trouble in their relations with others, they may come to define the problem in nonjudgmental ways as a conflict to be resolved or in moralistic terms as a product of the other’s deviant intentions or character. Empirical materials on troubles among college roommates reveal an initial preference for the former, with the latter typically emerging if and when initial response efforts fail and the trouble escalates. These findings force a revision of analyses that take up consideration of the conflict/deviance alternative only with the entrance of a third party into dyadic troubles.

Concerns about appearing prejudiced: Implications for anxiety during daily interracial interactions

We investigated the relationship between Whites’ and ethnic minorities’ concerns about appearing prejudiced and anxiety during daily interracial interactions. College roommate pairs completed an individual difference measure of concerns about appearing prejudiced at the beginning of the semester. Then they completed measures of anxiety and perceptions of their roommates’ anxiety-related behaviors for 15 days. Results indicated that among interracial roommate pairs, Whites’ and ethnic minorities’ concerns about appearing prejudiced were related to their self-reported anxiety on a daily basis; but this was not the case among same-race roommate pairs. In addition, among interracial roommate pairs, roommates who were concerned about appearing prejudiced began to “leak” their anxiety towards the end of the diary period, as indicated by their out-group roommate who perceived their anxious behaviors as increasing across time, and who consequently liked them less. The implications of these findings for intergroup relations are discussed in this article.

Very LeFreak (review)

Reviewed by: Very LeFreak Deborah Stevenson Cohn, Rachel. Very LeFreak. Knopf, 2010 [320p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-95758-1 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-85758-4 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-375-89552-4 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9–12 Very’s real name may be Veronica, but the intensifier suits curvaceous, vivacious Very better: as a freshman at Columbia, she’s always abuzz, simultaneously texting, listening to her iPod, and surfing the net, even while she’s attending class or planning underground student social networks. What she sees as an ability to multitask is viewed by the school as a failure to focus, a judgment supported by her poor academic performance—which spells doom for her college career, since Very’s on scholarship. After Very proves unable to settle down and save her own bacon, her [End Page 241] friends arrange for her to go into rehab, a month-long residential program where she’ll have to learn to find herself without electronics. Ebullient Very, the life and soul of multiple parties at any given moment, is an endearing and original character, and her overwired approach will be recognizable to many readers. Cohn writes with her usual spirited wit, and the third-person narration gives a hint of external perspective on Very’s frothy frenzy with its distance. The plot flattens out, though, when Very goes into rehab and explores her psyche, and the credibility crumbles—it’s completely implausible that her online crush spontaneously turns up at the same facility, and her speedy move into romance with her college roommate (Jennifer, though called “Lavinia” by Very) lacks believable grounding. Very’s pretty hard to resist, though, so readers who fall for her at the book’s start will probably stay with her until the hopeful conclusion. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ethnography, interaction and ordinary trouble

■ With the increased popularity and spread of sociological ethnography, one of the core elements of classic Chicago-style fieldwork — an abiding commitment to examine ongoing social interaction — has sometimes slipped from sight. One fruitful way of increasing sensitivity to and insights into interactional processes is to look at ordinary, small troubles, the often fleeting moments of upset and disruption that arise routinely in many interactions and are often quickly resolved, leading only to small adjustments and changes in life circumstances. By way of example, this article analyzes the ordinary troubles that arise between college roommates, focusing on two distinctive interactional features of these troubles: the obscuring of action components in low-visibility responses, leading to the appearance of passivity or inaction; and the varying and often shifting normative accents that can mark responses to ordinary troubles.

Predicting Commitment in New Relationships: Interactive Effects of Relational Self-construal and Power

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with highly relational self-construals define the self in terms of close relationships and tend to behave in ways that enhance the development and maintenance of important relationships (Cross, Morris, & Gore, 2002). Other research suggests that having power in a situation allows one to pursue important goals, which we hypothesize may also include relationship goals. We examined how relational self-construal and power interacted with self-disclosure and forgiveness to predict commitment in new college roommate relationships over the course of a semester. Analyses revealed that self-disclosure and forgiveness were strong predictors of commitment and change in commitment. Furthermore, relational self-construal and power moderated the association of self-disclosure and forgiveness with commitment.

Superordinate identity and intergroup roommate friendship development

A common ingroup identity promotes positive attitudes and behavior toward members of outgroups, but the durability of these effects and generalizability to relationships outside of the laboratory have been questioned. The present research examined how initial perceptions of common ingroup identity among randomly assigned college roommates provide a foundation for the development of intergroup friendships. For roommate dyads involving students who differed in race or ethnicity, respondents who were low on perceived intergroup commonality showed a significant decline in friendship over-time, whereas those high on perceived commonality showed consistently high levels of friendship. Similarly, participants in these dyads demonstrated a significant decline in feelings of friendship when their roommate was low in perceived commonality but not when their roommate was high in perceived commonality. These effects were partially mediated by anxiety experienced in interactions over-time. The implications of a common identity for intergroup relationship development are discussed.

Interracial Roommate Relationships: Negotiating Daily Interactions

Jobs, social group memberships, or living arrangements lead many people to interact every day with another person from a different racial background. Given that research has shown that interracial interactions are often stressful, it is important to know how these daily interactions unfold across time and what factors contribute to the success or failure of these interactions. Both members of same-race and mixed-race college roommate pairs completed daily questionnaires measuring their emotional experiences and their perceptions of their roommate. Results revealed that roommates in mixed-race dyads experienced less positive emotions and intimacy toward their roommates than did roommates in same-race dyads and that the experience of positive emotions declined over time for ethnic minority students with White roommates. Mediation analyses showed that the negative effects of roommate race were mediated by the level of intimacy-building behaviors performed by the roommate. Implications for future research and university policies are discussed.

Relational Anxiety in Interracial Interactions

Most of the research on intergroup anxiety has examined the impact of people's own anxiety on their own outcomes. In contrast, we show that in intergroup interactions, one's partner's anxiety is just as important as one's own anxiety (if not more important). Using a diary study among college roommates, we show that partners' anxiety predicts respondents' anxiety across time on a daily basis, as well as respondents' interest in living together again the next year. We discuss the importance of taking a relational approach to understanding intergroup interactions.

Responding to Roommate Troubles: Reconsidering Informal Dyadic Control

Existing analyses of informal control within dyadic relations neglect the nonpenal responses that characterize many such control efforts, and they give minimal attention to the interactional and interpretive processes that characterize such responses. And while dispute transformation provides a well-developed model of the development of dyadic disputes, this model is limited in prespecifying “injury” as the starting point for these processes and in neglecting informal reactions other than “claiming.” Integrating theories of informal control and dispute transformation, this article provides a case study analyzing the nature and processes of informal reactions to troubles involving college roommates, identifying three general categories of such response: managerial reactions, which involve unilateral, nonconfrontational efforts to manage the consequences or implications of the trouble or to change indirectly the troubling behavior; complaint-making reactions, where the troubled party attempts to get the other to change the disturbing behavior; and distancing and punitive reactions, which are relationally despairing responses marked by open confrontation and hostility.

Everything You Want (review)

Reviewed by: Everything You Want Deborah Stevenson Shoup, Barbara; Everything You Want;. Flux, 2008; [312p] ISBN 978-0-7387-1227-7 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 A winning Lotto Cash ticket means a $50 million windfall for Emma's family, and for Emma it seems like the ideal solution: she's been an unhappy, insecure freshman at college, unable to get over a high-school crush who never turned from boy friend to boyfriend, so the excuse to leave is welcome. The money seems to complicate as much as it helps, though, with Emma's mother weighted down by guilt and the breadth of possibility and Emma's older sister finding that the way she handles her unexpected riches is poisoning her new relationship. Meanwhile, Emma's discovering that her problems didn't get left behind at college, and that she can't spend away the self-doubt that she carries with her like a shield. While the story is somewhat rambling and talky, it depicts Emma's difficulty in moving on to adulthood with sympathetic perceptivity. Her narration is sharp yet revealing, and it's particularly illuminating to see how much she's missing because she can't believe she's worthy of other people's interest, romantic and otherwise; other characters are vivid as well, especially her sweet, perky college roommate Tiffany, Emma's polar opposite yet doggedly loyal friend, who tries to tell Emma about the possibilities available to her. The sudden-wealth plot runs as an undercurrent through the book, notable in Emma more for what it doesn't change than what it does, even as the shakeup in her family forces her to finally define herself individually. This will be an interesting counterpoint to Caletti's recent bonanza tale, The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (BCCB 3/08), and it will offer some reassurance to teens wondering about their own forthcoming family separation. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois