Eternal Triangle: 'Tween Novels by Lisa Yee

The summer between sixth and seventh grade isn't turning out so great for Stanford Wong and Millicent Minn. At first it's shaping up perfectly for Stanford, who has made the seventh-grade basketball A-Team and been selected to go to a prestigious summer sports camp. There's only one cloud in his summertime sky. He's failed sixth grade English! That means no b-ball camp and no A-Team unless he passes Mr. Glick's summer school English class. It looks like a bummer summer when Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time.

Enter Millicent Minn, Girl Genius. Millie is a child prodigy, not yet twelve and due to begin her senior year in high school. Her summer plans include her first course at the local college. To Millie's dismay, her mom, who is worried about her lack of friends, signs her up for, of all things, a volleyball team. Because their grandmothers are best friends, Stanford's occasionally dotty grandmother Yin-Yin persuades Millicent's grandmother that Millie is the perfect English tutor for Stanford. Now Millie has to put up with bonehead Stanford all summer. She is also dreadful at volleyball, and practice is a constant embarrassment until a teammate, Emily Ebers, approaches her sympathetically and Millie finds herself, for the first time in her life, with a best friend. The only problem is that she can't let Emily discover that she's a fairly famous girl genius, or the friendship may be ruined!

More complications arise when Stanford seems to be on the way to becoming Emily's boyfriend! Stanford and Millicent become allies when they cooperate in making Emily think Stanford is tutoring Millie rather than the other way around. Both Stanford and Millie know that they must tell Emily the truth sometime--but each keeps putting off the fateful moment.

Meanwhile, family complications keep Millie worried about her mother's strange sickness and her grandmother's impending move to London. Stanford watches his much-loved grandmother forced to move to a residential home and tries not to think about his parents' quarrels over his father's heavy work schedule. Millicent dutifully tutors the resistant Stanford, who finally begins to knuckle down to pass his English class so that he can start the year as a seventh grade basketball phenom instead of a repeating sixth-grade loser.

Things come to a head when Emily accidentally finds out that both Millie and Stanford have been deceiving her and breaks off with both of them. Millie is devastated and Stanford is at a loss about what to do until Millie finally screws up the courage to tell Emily that she wants to be friends again. Good-hearted Emily forgives Millie and Stanford and the three are, for the first time, all friends with each other.

The wonderfully cool thing about this typical 'tween story is that it is told in two separate books. While Stanford Wong is dealing with keeping his basketball buddies from finding out he's going to summer school, genius Millicent Min is discovering that her college "friend" is really stringing her along for the free homework help. Each character confides in and worries about changes in his or her relationship with a beloved grandmother. Stanford's father is more and more the absent parent as he competes for a promotion at work, and Millicent's under-employed father fakes a successful job search out of embarrassment, while Millie's mother's mysterious "sickness" turns out to be a surprise pregnancy. Author Lisa Yee manages to keep both balls (volleyball and basketball, in this case) in the air as she gives each character a unique and highly appealing voice in these two engaging novels.

And, as a bonus, Yee scores a three-pointer with her new book, So Totally Emily Ebers, in which Emily tells her side of the three-way story of Millicent's and Stanford's summer. Kind-hearted and accepting as a friend, Emily, too, has her family problems. Her mom, a well-known journalist, has moved from the East to the West Coast following an unhappy divorce. Emily adores her father and is somewhat angry with her mother for ending the marriage, and although she has better social skills than Millie, she perhaps needs their friendship even more.

This is a skillfully written trilogy of novels which give middle schoolers a chance to see the same situations from the honest points of view of three very different but very appealing characters. Lisa Yee, who won the Sid Fleischman Award for Humor for Millicent Minn, Girl Genius is an author to watch!