Having known a major illustrator (Dale Oliver) for Disney, and meeting a few of his friends, a couple of times; this banter back and forth between the girls is nearly the same as what I used to hear from his group of friends. He was a Chief, Illustrator on "The Fox and The Hound" movie; and I, and my sister, and brothers were given copies of some of his "pencil art" ** when he was first designing the Hound character. If I recall properly, I was about age 16 at the time. My Dad and Mom knew him because Dad and he flew together in WWII as Glider pilots, so we kids got introduced to him and his family.
Sadly, he died about 20 years ago. About 4 months ago, I was at Disney World with my family and went to the Animation Studios, and was looking at all the great "CELLs" hanging on the walls around that area.
A woman named Audrey was working at the Artist Desk and was working on doing a "CELL".***
I asked her if there were any by Dale Oliver hanging somewhere there.
She looked at me and said Dale? I replied, yes, Dale Oliver and she said you know him? I replied yes, but he had passed away some years ago.
She then told me when she had been hired at Disney World 25 years earlier, as an artist/illustrator, when Disney World was first opening, they sent her and several others out to LA and Disney Studios there for some training and Dale was her first Disney art/illustrator teacher.
We wound up talking with each other for almost 2 hours. Very, Very interesting indeed.
** Pencil Art is where the illustrator assigned to a specific animated character starts developing his/her interpretation what he/she feels the character will look like. It is as the name implies is done in pencil and on paper, so it can be erased and fixed as required during the development stages. This was back in the hand done days.
***A "CELL" is a picture done on heavy cellophane, hence the "nickname". It is an enlarged completed picture of ONE FRAME of an animated movie, that has been done by hand, at least back in the day. Now most are done by computer or some other form, and very few are hand done now. If the CELL is from a famous Disney movie and is an original, it can be worth Hundreds of Thousands of dollars and a few have gone on auction for a couple of million.
Ones that you can purchase, such as Audrey, the woman I met, was working on, can range from $75.00 to several hundreds of dollars. Again the price is based on the subject character and/or movie scene being done.
Janice Lynn

As I have an old 9 year old Nokia feature phone. In a lot of ways one can envy the lack of drama Sarah's transition: Posse, check. Supportive family, check. Work support, check. Partner support, check. Story needs some kind of tension to keep it interesting, which you mention comes in book 2.