Sail On! United Tates of America by Paula Danziger

My name is Skate Tate. I'm eleven years old and I've just about finished my first day of sixth grade at Biddle Middle. Actually, my first day has just about finished me. Skate Tate of Biddle Middle. It sounds like a Dr. Seuss book but it's not...it's my life.

Sarah Kate Tate (alias Skate) hates to leave her pleasant life at Maurice Sendak Elementary behind. After all, she could walk home with Susie, her cousin and best friend, in five minutes and 42 seconds, and the two inseparable friends could spend every afternoon playing, scrapbooking, and doing homework together.

But now all that is past. Entering middle school means riding a bus an hour each way, dealing with a locker that won't open, and watching Susie find a new best friend the first day of school. Middle school means having an English teacher, Mrs. Lipschutz, who seems all right and a science teacher, Mr. Booth, who has hair growing out of his ears. Middle school means sitting on the bus next to three boys, whose actual names are Hughie, Louie, and Duey, who quack instead of talking, and, worst of all, it means going home to spend her afternoons alone.

Paula Danziger's talent for catching the voice and cartwheeling emotions of early adolescence is seen full blown in this funny and poignant novel which documents the first of what will be many changes in the life of Skate Tate. Observant and resilient, she makes a place for herself in her new middle school world by earning a position as cartoonist and art editor for her school newspaper and begins to make a friend of her co-artist Garth Garrison. Lucky Skate, she has a strong family to support her as she moves forward--parents with a sense of humor, and a sister, improbably named Emma Tate ("what were my parents thinking?") a sometimes pest who shares her love for the "Happy Scrappys," the friends who meet to work on their projects every Saturday. Best of all is her globe-trotting Great Uncle Mort (called GUM by the family) who brings back wonderful, just right gifts and encourages Skate to "expand your horizons, not to be afraid, not to be stuck in one place."

Skate is perplexed when GUM gives her his Christmas presents in October and devastated when he dies of a heart attack soon after. Typically, Mort leaves behind a personal video and a behest in his will which will fund family trips to places he had wished to take them. The "United Tates," as they name themselves, buy a new van (christened "Vincent Van Go") and make a trip to the first site on GUM's list, Plymouth Rock and Plimouth Plantation. As they visit the Pilgrim sites that Uncle Mort chose for her to see, Skate suddenly understands what her favorite uncle wanted her to know--that life is indeed a series of many settings forth and many landings.

United Tates of America includes a bonus appendix, Skate's scrapbook pages documenting her first semester at Biddle Middle School, designed by Paula Danziger, herself an ardent scrapbooker.

Danziger's other novels of early adolescence include her classic The Cat Ate my Gymsuit and its sequel There's a Bat in Bunk Five, The Divorce Express, Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?, and the first in her Matthew Martin series, Everyone Else's Parents Said Yes.

Additionally, in a collaboration made in literary heaven, there are the two wonderful books, P. S.: Longer Letter Later and Snail Mail No More co-written with Ann M. Martin. The story of two best friends, separated by a family move at the beginning of middle school, consists of a series of letters which become emails in the second book, in which Ann M. Martin writes in the voice of Elizabeth, thoughtful and reserved, and Danziger writes in the voice of Starr, an adventurous and flamboyant character always ready to jump into new experiences.