Lucy Bloom wakes up on her 11th birthday luxuriating in a dream about a shiny new bike she hopes to receive. Instead, she is gifted with a pair of scuffed metal roller skates. She doesn't complain, just dutifully laces up and trots awkwardly down the street, silently hoping things will get better. This sets the stage for Lucy's clumsy journey of stubborn stoicism, wishing her life will get easier and grasping for control whenever she can get it. She hopes her parents will get along and be happy, that Estelle Pomper and her cruel clan of bitchy preteens will stop ostracizing her, and that she will someday not befit the moniker Boney the Bug Eyes. From the start of this snappy coming-of-age novel, you want tenderhearted Lucy to kick some ass in her tiny world, populated with unhappy adults and their lonely offspring. Bloom is an imaginative only-child brilliantly imagined by Lauren Kirshner, who creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for, even while cringing at the awkwardness of her journey. The book is divided into four sections organized by age - preteen, junior high and high school, and ending with a short send-off to adulthood. A lot happens to Lucy in each segment, while she seeks out home and identity despite a tilt-a-whirl of unpredictable circumstances. Where We Have to Go, by Lauren Kirshner, Emblem, 256 pages, $22.99 In section one, we meet the Bloom parents, true 1980s archetypes dealing with the dissolution of that era's glitzy promise,